Karl Lauterbach: Dumb or Liar?

In his short, open thread today, Eugyppius mentions a recent interview given by Karl Lauterbach in which he says that without lockdowns, a million Germans would have died from COVID.

Open Thread Because I Have Been Moving Books Around All Day

Let’s take a quick look at how plausible this is. Using the Our World in Data set of data for Germany, I see the following:

In the above, the grey bars represent the weekly confirmed COVID deaths, while the blue line shows the cumulative confirmed COVID Deaths. As you can see, as of the latest data, there have been ~170K confirmed COVID deaths in Germany, a rather far cry from 1 million. You can also see that I have labeled the single most deadly (COVID deaths) week in Germany. In week 3 of 2021 (mid January), they experienced 6,096 COVID deaths. Hmm, I wondered, what if every single week in the pandemic had been as bad as week 3 of 2021 (i.e. every week experienced 6,096 COVID deaths)? Well, here is what the cumulative death totals would have looked like (orange line) vs. what they actually looked like (blue line):

The blue line reaches almost up to 980K. So, Karl’s best estimate is that without lockdowns, the number of deaths would have been roughly equivalent to having their worst week of the entire pandemic repeated every week for the entire time horizon. That is, to put it mildly, a rather aggressive estimate.

I return to the question in the title of this post, “Karl Lauterbach: Dumb or Liar?”