Lockdowns have saved more than three million lives from coronavirus in Europe, a study estimates.
The team at Imperial College London said the “death toll would have been huge” without lockdown.
But they warned that only a small proportion of people had been infected and we were still only “at the beginning of the pandemic”.
Another study argued global lockdowns had “saved more lives, in a shorter period of time, than ever before”.
The Imperial study assessed the impact of restrictions in 11 European countries – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK – up to the beginning of May.
By that time, around 130,000 people had died from coronavirus in those countries.
The researchers used disease modelling to predict how many deaths there would have been if lockdown had not happened. And the work comes from the same group that guided the UK’s decision to go into lockdown.
