> The countries that did really well in the pandemic (east asian countries) typically went for what seemed like drastic measures in the early stages. As time went on, it's become apparent that their liberties, economies, and also case numbers were all far less impacted by the pandemic compared to western countries that had to go into emergency lockdowns as case counts soared out of control. Even in the limited context of western europe, one of the reasons why the UK had so many days in lockdown (more than France or Germany, often with more stringent rules, iirc) was because they prevaricated so much about bringing in lockdowns, then had to make them much tighter to compensate.
This raises an interesting point I hadn't considered; assuming that there will still be some transfer of the virus during lockdown (although presumably more limited) due to people still needing to go out to get food (or have food delivered, which still requires someone else going out), getting medical care, etc., the amount of time needed to stay in lockdown to lower the number of cases below a given threshold seem like it would grow in relation to the number of cases at the time lockdown was initiated. To make up some numbers, if the goal is to get the number of cases below 1% of the population, it's much easier to get there if you start the lockdown with only 2% of the country infected versus 5%. I don't have anywhere near the expertise to do even the most naive of calculations of how many extra days that would translate into in the real world, but given that I imagine the virus spreads faster than it goes away, it sounds like delaying by a certain amount of time would lead to _more_ than that amount of time needed to stay in lockdown. I wonder if the US had gone into lockdown at the beginning of March or even earlier, then the lockdown might have been shortened by months.