The other thing is that every time a measure was effective, they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again.
That said, as China proved, a totalitarian lockdown (where people were locked in their house) didn't work in the long run either. China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed.
"they would stop doing it so that the cases would go back up again" is quite the statement. How about this instead: "Extreme measures to slow down cases had obvious down sides and were used as sparingly as possible, and eased up when not as necessary"?
Correlation, meaning things are related, means that one of them might be the cause of another, or they could all be the effects of some unrecognized / unobserved phenomenon.
Correlation is the mother of conjecture; conspiracy is a bunch of people huddling in a small space breathing the same air and posting about it on twitter.
That doesn't mean that all correlation results in conspiracy, but conspiracy loves correlation. Without the conspiracy part it's just a good starting point for scientific inquiry. The nuance is lost on the CO2 saturated tweeters.
Wasn't China famously locked down long past the point where the rest of the world was back up and getting on with life? By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.
It’s funny you say that. China disallowed their citizens from using western vaccines including Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca. Chinese citizens were only allowed to receive Chinese made vaccines. For all we know, they needed their lockdowns until so late because their own vaccines lacked efficacy in baseline protection.
It has been proven the government was wrong about all of their Covid predictions and the methodology for care was flawed because it ignored basic care. Many people died because the government ignored actual science and set out to squelch those that disagreed. This is exactly what our government shouldn't be.
Under what possible circumstances will this be the right thing to do? It's already very apparent that the historically unprecedented worldwide Covid lockdowns have had a devastating effect on the prospects of the poorest in society, while seriously enriching the wealthiest (go and take a look at the Forbes rich list, and find someone who has lost money since 2020. You'll have to look very hard).