In your opinion, what is the single best piece of evidence to show someone who believes in lockdowns that they didn't work?

For me, it will be New Zealand's large increase in deaths in 2021.

NZ was praised routinely by the media as a country that prevented covid. It is absolutely true that they prevented deaths from covid as well as overall deaths in their elderly. 2020 winter elderly mortality rates were historically low.

See the large gap between the orange 2020 bars and the blue 2019 bars in NZ winter. Many deaths that would have normally happened did not.

However, notice how the gap closes in Nov and in Dec 2020 overtakes it. Early data from Jan 2021 shows this pattern continuing.

If NZ continues this trend for the rest of 2021, it wipes out all of the "success" it had in 2020.

While 2021 has just begun, the past 6 weeks of data has seen a huge increase in mortality rate for 80+, about 15% total extra deaths and 10% higher pop adjusted.

Even for this relatively small time frame, the chance that this increase arises randomly is well under 1%.

Summer months have lower variance than winter months, so to see this rise in mortality in the summer is even stronger evidence that it is significant.

The winter could be especially bad for NZ as there will be a much higher 80+ population alive and could put pressure on the medical system and even moreso if there is an outbreak of any kind (flu/covid/other resp virus).

There are major consequences for attempting to lower mortality for the elderly with drastic measures and NZ provides a good test case for measuring these consequences.

I know people and especially the media like to point out single year anomalies, and these are important, but they must be balanced with a longer term perspective.

3 year mortality rates 2019-2021 will give us a much better indication of overall mortality.

I predict that Sweden's 2019-2021 mortality rate will be very similar to NZ's 2019-2021.

In summary, New Zealand's 2021 mortality rate makes the best case for showing how inadequate lockdowns were at preventing death.