Suppose someone offered, say, ten million dollars to the first team that could write code to discern, from the outcome data, which areas had locked down and had mask mandates, and which hadn't. Would anyone be able to claim it?
If the answer is no, is it possible that most of what governments did in response to this outbreak was inferior to what they did on previous similar outbreaks, i.e., basically nothing? (Was there anything like a lockdown or a mask mandate during the HK flu in 1968?)