Mallen Baker is that rare YouTuber who strives to be scrupulously fair and objective in his assessments of contentious, politically tinged public policy issues. His channel gets nowhere near the views it deserves.

The Johns Hopkins study is not an original study, but a meta-analysis of  a number of other studies looking at the issue in question. It is an attempt to extract signal from the noise of multiple studies conducted using different methodologies, with different sample sizes and data sets. This in itself makes such studies inherently problematic, what statisticians term the "heterogeneity problem". Which studies to include? What weight to attach to teach? Baker points to some dubious selections for the study in question.

Apart from which, there is the strange definition of a "lockdown". The study counts as a lockdown any "non-pharmaceutical intervention", including in addition to what we would normally understand as a lockdown any mandated mask requirement, or social distancing rule, or travel restriction (including international ones), and so on. On this definition just about every country, including Sweden which has had one of the most relaxed regimes, is counted as "locked down" for virtually the entirety of the pandemic.

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