Prove it. I want definitive proof that the measures they took saved more lives than alternative measures that might have been taken.
Of course it's impossible to "prove" which measures had which impact without running the same experiment 10000 times on 10000 different Earths.
But here's almost a (horrible) controlled experiment, as close to an apples-to-apples comparison we'll ever get:
Sweden, famously praised by some U.S. politicians for its non-intervention response to COVID, suffered significantly more both in terms of loss of human lives (10x (!) more people (per 100,000) killed than in neighboring countries), and economically (more , than its direct neighbors:
"Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway."
"Plus, Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%."
"Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
You're cherry picking, and the country you're doing it with is pretty weak evidence.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Here's a fun one. Explain why states with less strict mandates aren't worse.
If you're going to group countries together in an attempt to prove the measures are working you should be able to take that same theory and do it all over the world. Except if you were to do that then it wouldn't up.
So, sure apples-to-apples buddy. Get to explaining why your theory isn't holding up in the rest of the EU or the states.