early stringent covid responses(such as in China) probably saved millions of lives in the responsive countries, but i guess post-covid will be litigated with vibes not numbers
> cross-sectional variation in response and results that disprove your claim
What do you mean? The spread was low enough during the period where it was high mortality that in China, we can lower bound at 1 million even with best case assumptions about mortality compared to the US that likely wouldn't have been true in a still developing country.