Exactly. People who complain about the NSA spying on Americans don’t appreciate how many terrorist incidents were stopped. It would be way worse otherwise.

Compare states - Florida with almost no mitigation, vs New York, New Jersey, or California with extreme mitigation.

Go ahead and check the pre-vaccine data - there is no indication that the extreme mitigations did anything.

This is an unfalsifiable claim. Sweden used but a fraction of the mitigations Israel did, yet the former is better off now.

How can you prove the mitigations worked? The only controls out there (Sweden, some US states, etc.) aren’t very robust (nor in favor of mitigation efforts).

There's no convincing evidence the mitigations made a real difference, especially in the long-run. I'd expect to see bodies in the streets in Sweden given that they largely avoided the ritualistic behavior that the rest of the western world engaged in.

Unfortunately, people have it so drilled into their heads that the lockdowns and masks worked, that I don't know what I could possibly say to convince someone otherwise.