A new study that examined “excess death” data to gauge the impact of shelter-in-place policies on mortality concluded that lockdowns or stay-at-home policies failed to save lives. Economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation sought to evaluate the net impact of shelter-in-place (SIP) mandates by examining excess death data from 43 countries and all 50 U.S. states. Researchers determine excess deaths, or excess mortality, by comparing the observed number of deaths to an expected number of deaths derived from statistical models. “We use an event study framework to quantify changes in the number of excess deaths after the implementation of a SIP policy. We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases,” the researchers wrote in a working paper published under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Looking at data from both the United States and other countries, the researchers …