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"Outside of Wuhan, no evidence was found of any significant increase in overall mortality, suggesting the success of the rapid control of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in addition to appropriate maintenance of healthcare services during the nationwide lockdown."
In this thread I will use travel data to show that the lockdown was too late for this to have been possible.
I will further show that this study uses distorted graphs making the lockdown look like it occurred earlier than it really did.
Liu J, Zhang L, Yan Y, Zhou Y, Yin P, Qi J et al.
Excess mortality in Wuhan city and other parts of China during the three months of the covid-19 outbreak: findings from nationwide mortality registries
BMJ 2021; 372 :n415
doi:10.1136/bmj.n415
To put this all together:
All cause mortality in Wuhan was well above normal by the time the lockdown was implemented.
Given that deaths lag infections, and given that only a small fraction of infections lead to death, the outbreak would have already been totally out of control by then.
The lockdown was implemented on the peak travel day of the worlds largest annual migration, and there was no travel slow down leading up to it.
An estimated 7 million people left the city in the weeks leading up to the lockdown, including 300,000 people on the eve of the lockdown.
Given this data, it is simply implausible that the lockdown meaningfully prevented overall mortality from increasing in Hubei province outside Wuhan or the rest of China.
