The idea that you can lockdown in week 13 and have 12,000 excess deaths per week 3 weeks later because hospitals were "virtually empty" also seems absurd ... Emergency healthcare remained available and the messaging was that people should still go to hospital if they were ill.

The problem is lots of things that sound absurd related to COVID end up being true. Our intuitions are not a good guide to an event that's never happened before. So we rely on data, but it's hard to interpret and can be wildly misleading.

For instance, here you express an intuition that people would have continued going to the hospital because "the messaging was people should still go". In the UK? Definitely that wasn't the case. People were told they had to "save the NHS" and that there was a massive programme of field hospital construction because the government was certain they were going to run out of beds. They were told there was a deadly virus and they shouldn't leave their homes. The government ran advertising campaigns that looked like a promo for a zombie movie.

This slaughtered hospital admissions:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Total attendance dropped from about 18,000 a day to more like 9,000 per day. It halved overnight. Your intuition about what people did was quite wrong. Even today admissions have not fully recovered.

We don't know how many of those people really needed to be there or else they'd die. But it seems the halving was independent of people's medical needs: cardiac admissions also halved. They went from around 500 per day to more like 250 per day. So that's 1750 missing cardiac ER admissions per week. Some of those people certainly will have died.

And hospitals not only emptied themselves, flushing sick people (with many viruses) into care homes where they then spread them around. But they also refused to take sick people from care homes, so deaths in care homes tripled but deaths linked to the virus only account for half of the increase (and "linked to" is very vague, there are many incorrect classifications there):

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/27/care-homes-see-r...

We agree that there's absolutely a critical question about why some countries saw an increase in excess deaths and others saw nothing happen. Clearly if this is genuinely the same virus, and it's the same tests that are detecting it so it must be, then the differences are likely be explained by differing actions taken by governments.

When put in context, Germany didn't actually see any excess deaths, look at the graphs:

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Socie...

If you showed the top three lines to someone who didn't read the news and asked them to pick the year with the scary epidemic, they'd say 2018. There's just no evidence of anything happening in these graphs - the slightly elevated above average number during the "epidemic" is identical in size to the slightly under-average death rates before it started. Sadly you do see people cite figures like "deaths were elevated by X% compared to the same week last year", which is misleading. We'd expect these numbers to wander up and down around the average over time. Yet they supposedly have 200,000 confirmed cases. The most reasonable explanation is that COVID is essentially re-labelling people, and when they die they're labelled as COVID deaths instead of other causes.

In Switzerland excess mortality looked pretty much the same as in 2017 (e.g. peaked at the same levels):

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/health/state...

Again, there's just no evidence of anything unusual happening here. If you showed the graphs to someone who didn't know about COVID they'd never imagine anything was happening. The "spike" is relative only to a smoothed rolling average, but such "spikes" are common and happen in many years, so it's not unusual when compared in a more granular way. If COVID had never been discovered we'd have seen these excess death rates and simply assigned them to the flu, as happens every year.

In the UK the excess death rate was higher, but still no cause for alarm. It matches the famously deadly winters of 1998/1999/2000. Hmm, I don't remember any such deadly winters. People were saying the world would end because of the millennium bug, not any other kind of bug :) Clearly there's a loss of proportion here. When I pointed this fact out to a friend, he was confused for a moment and then tried to argue that maybe we are just much more caring than people were in 1999, so death rates and reactions are incomparable! How silly!

The question is not whether people died because of COVID induced panic. There is abundant evidence they did, especially in care homes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023

https://swprs.org/covid-19-a-report-from-italy/

https://samnytt.se/aldreboendets-personal-kan-inte-svenska-a...

The question is merely what proportion of it was due to that.