Yeah but there were and are nasty side effects to this, covering literally hundreds of millions or rather billions of people in some form. Missed social interaction is super important for child development, but how do you want to measure that, how many harm points do you assign to this versus some old or frail person dying. And look at ie India, delaying the height of infection didn't help them at all, estimated numbers of dead there are what, 5 millions? Let's not focus on just few wealthy nations, human life is human life regardless of origin.

Also psychical stress from prolonged withdrawal from most if not all social interactions. We fucked up economy pretty badly and still seeing the results of it, made millions of financially very vulnerable people lose their job or family business overnight. And so on and on. Typical HN crowd is probably the least impacted so we are not a good sample to discuss this objectively.

In number of deaths alone yes it was without question the best course of action. The bigger picture, I am not so sure. And cases like Sweden show that restrictions were mostly stupid flexing of control powers by politicians who were generally during crisis clueless as fuck, and the harder they went the more they polarized non-trivial part of society. Again we still see the effects and they are not going anywhere, ever.

If I would be and old and frail person in high risk category, I personally would take all effin' risks and don't screw up childhood (and conversely rest of life) of my grandkids. But that's just me.