The problem is assuming that no mask mandate means nobody wears masks. As the top poster said, people still wore masks, but it wasn't forced. I suspect this is true of a number of places that didn't have mask mandates.

Also, what we are calling lock downs, weren't really good lock downs. People still went out, people still went to the grocery store and other stores, and other places. I happen to be friends with a contact tracer, and the problem was the lock downs actually made the pandemic worst in a number of cases. If someone got sick in a household, everyone in the house got sick. I would argue if everyone is stuck in the house together and someone gets sick, there is no escape. By the time the person has even figured out they are sick, it's too late because everyone is home all of the time. Now, that's not to say without lock downs this wouldn't have still happened, but the lock downs practically guarantee that someone sharing a house with a sick person is spending most of their day in that location exposed to covid.

I think it's too early to know if lock downs were that useful. I don't think we will know for years as more data is gathered and people look at the kind of lock downs, and places that didn't do lock downs. Maybe some places that didn't do lock downs did well due to a different climate, or because they were more rural. But this would lead to the conclusion that maybe lock downs are not the best solution for all places, maybe they are good for cities and not as useful for rural areas. I think that's something that we might find out in the future.