(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)
It’s obviously a rhetorical question. I’d suggest that in all cases whether such mandates are appropriate depends on their proportionality relative to the harms they prevent.
Car accidents are 30-40k/year in the US, so 10% of covid. And the number of measures taken to reduce car accidents is extraordinary - age limits, compulsory driver's licenses, city design rules (roads, pedestrian crossings, etc, etc), speed limits, car construction regulations, compulsory insurance, and more. Given that, what's the appropriate level of regulation you suggest for covid?
So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.
In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.
So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.
NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.
Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]
As a vaccinated person I flat out blame the people that didn't get vaccinated for making the last year much worse than it'd had to be. If we had better vaccine coverage we wouldn't need the restrictions that we had to put in place. They don't only put burden on the healthcare system (which they do), preventing people that need care from getting it (which they do), but they also mean the rest of us have to do more because they're not willing to do their share. I guess the bright side is that this is a tiny minority around these parts.
While we developed vaccines at an impressive speed, governments royally screwed up the rollouts and logistics. Had we all done real proper lockdowns and taken public health recommendations seriously for a few weeks, and had governments been properly supportive (ie.: enabling) of that, our current vaccination uptake might have been enough to eradicate covid-19.
It’s mentioned in Pierre Poliveres speech in parliament, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/cGbnjF3OdNQ
Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.
Why do you believe this? Do you assume there is no benefit to doing so? Or do you assume that the harms outweigh the benefits?
You'd be wrong on both counts. [1]
The health impacts of vaccinated, and unvaccinated, have been measured according to current models. And in current models, getting the disease does not offer as much protection as also getting the vaccine - and thus protecting the wider population is best done with a mandate. A minuscule number of individuals is posing a threat to the rest of the population. The freedoms of the individual end where society begins. One doesn't get to walk down the street threatening to punch everyone they meet, even if they never throw a punch.
That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.
Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?
Likewise if you think that the healthcare system capacity was the only limiting factor with respect to COVID-19 public health measures that reduced transmission your model of the epidemiology of SARS-Cov-2 is incorrect.
"I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada."
You didn't say that in the comment I replied to, maybe you said it elsewhere?
$40k per person in Canada is 37 million X 40,000 - that's 1.5 trillion CAD, right? Is my math correct on that? That's 2 years of the entire federal budget where did you get that number from?
Why do you think our hospitals are understaffed? It’s not because of the great pay of the Canadian system