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Quite to the contrary, these would have been the worst lockdowns. They would incur extreme costs while at best postponing the epidemic for a week or a month. The strongest argument for lockdowns was "flatten the curve" until you compare the capacity of hospitals vs infection rate and find out that it would take years of lockdowns for hospitals to churn through all the cases. Anybody with two brain cells knew that lockdowns will not be there just for a week or a month, that was deliberate tactic in order to persuade population and opposition to accept them. Once the laws and edicts passed lockdowns became what they were.
Also another point that passed by a lot of people was that the early ancestral strain had R0 of around 2.8 and I remember reading about how lockdowns may be able to push that bellow one. The delta strain had R0 of over 5.0 and no amount of reasonable lockdowns or masking could flatten that one: lockdown delta was basically as if no measures ancestral strain. But by then the idiocy was already entrenched, washing of hands, lockdowns and masks were turned basically into religious ritual - something akin to killing cats during plague. Something has to be done, lockdowns are something so let's do it.
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