All disasters have physical parameters. Fires need flammable materials and a level of dryness. Tornadoes and hurricanes need atmospheric pressure differences to propagate in a given direction. Earthquakes happen near fault lines. COVID has to be transmitted (somehow, physically, whether through air, aerosols, water, contact, but something).

There is almost no way that lockdowns did nothing. It may have been overkill, there may have been a single aspect of lockdowns that far outperformed everything else, and we could have just practiced that. But this fatalistic view is lazy, unscientific and reductive, and in a societally harmful way.