[volta83]

Good question.

Excess mortality in the USA and the EU in 2020 were ~470k and ~580k deaths.

The population of the USA and the EU in Jan 2020 was ~329 and ~447 million.

The excess mortality in the USA and the EU in 2020 was ~143 vs ~129 excess deaths per 100.000 inhabitants. The USA had ~10% more excess deaths per capita than the EU.

People living in the EU during 2020 had statistically a significantly better chance of not dying of COVID than people living in the USA, even though COVID hit the EU first, which gave the USA longer time to prepare.

This doesn't really answer your question, because the answer is very personal. Some people were really scared and preferred to trade some freedom for more safety. And well we have many examples of vocal famous people that traded off safety for freedom, and died of COVID. These people would have probably been better off had they lived in the EU, even if they would have been breaking the law and paying fines.

[disambiguation]

This is really dumb.

There was no pan-Euro response nor was there a pan-American response, so these groupings are arbitrary. Unless you have an objective "score" that Euro lockdowns and policies on average went further than American lockdown policies, these numbers are meaningless.

You could easily justify the differences as deriving from Europe having an objectively healthier population and better healthcare systems than the US.

[volta83]

I just showed the data, and summarized that according to the data, people in the EU had better chances.

I never claimed that this data is the result of COVID policies.

This is something you made up, and then proceeded to debunk, which is essentially the definition of a strawman.

Please stop building strawmans and putting words in people's mouth. It's unpolite.

[disambiguation]

So some one asks about the math on the success of lockdown policies, and you take the opportunity to do the math on... something completely unrelated?

It's not clear you're making any claims at all, which begs the question why you bothered posting in the first place.

[volta83]

Its not completely unrelated.

Excess mortality is the only fact that we know for sure given that every country counts "COVID deaths" differently.

Given that there is a statistical difference, the only thing we can probably know for sure is that an individual chances were slightly better in the EU.

The difference is small, like others have mentioned, so it doesn't seem like EU policies did a lot for the whole EU.

This makes sense, since for example Germany had pretty harsh policies, but due some of its neighboring countries having pretty lax policies (e.g. Austria), some parts of Germany were extremely affected (e.g. Bavaria).

This hints that it doesn't really matter if single states have harsher policies as long as neighboring states do not, at least for states of the size of Germany.

If we look at China, which had a very cohesive policy in all its provinces, the story differs.

This hints that if cohesive policies would have been taken at EU and USA scale, the outcome might have been different.

That didn't happen, so we will never know for sure.

This doesn't answer the OP question, but if someone claims to have an answer, they are probably lying, because we don't really have facts to back that answer up.

[adam_arthur]

I wouldn't call 10% difference significantly higher... more like within the margin of error.

With such drastic policy differences you would expect to see a larger effect.

[MagnumOpus]

The EU didn’t act as one entity in the epidemic/lockdown/furlough policies. In particular Eastern European countries went with US-like policies (and less vaccine provision and even more anti accents) and and suffered more than the US.

The Nordics, France and German-speaking countries have half the death rate of the US or less, in some cases even negative excess deaths.

[volta83]

The US didn't act as one entity either.

[r00fus]

Well, I'd say the biggest difference was that in the EU, many countries would give you 80% unemployment to stay home for many months.

In the US, you'd get a few thousand $, many months later. So yeah, you might have had a similar chance to catch COVID but your livelihood and financial security were much more secure in Europe.

Policy-wise w/r/t COVID, EU and US are nowhere near NZ, Tiawan or China. Now that's containment taken seriously and it shows.

[adam_arthur]

Many in the US made significantly more on the combination of enhanced unemployment and stimulus checks than they had made working. Greater than 100% previous wage.

You can see the aggregate personal income data here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PI

[shin_lao]

10% difference for a virus with exponential spread is a margin of error difference.