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That’ll require a lot of public amnesia, as restaurant bookings dropped before official lockdown orders arrived in most areas. Huge swaths of the population voluntarily locked down before it became mandatory, blaming the government for the lockdowns would be extremely weird.

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It's a combination of voluntary and mandatory. The question is whether the mandatory part overstepped. It's a fair question. Did it do more harm than good in some cases? Did it prevent businesses from being able to adapt to the situation? Like what some ended up doing with moving seating outside, or converting to a different model, etc. But if there's a mandate that "all X must close", you're blocking adaptations and any chance of them figuring out a way to survive.

That’s a nuanced opinion that wasn’t expressed by the parent comment.

As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.

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