This opinion piece is citing a lot of evidence and blatantly misinterpreting it. At a minimum it defers to the IHME models as the reference standard but they’ve performed terribly; similarly it cites Ioannidis from Stanford who has consistently failed to predict the actual consequences of the disease and is being ridiculed by the scientific community.
Soon to be 100,000 dead in the US with lockdowns; how could it have been a mistake? The only mistake was not doing it earlier.