Glad to see the lockdown myth is being busted.
It's not about the lockdown though. It's a reflection of the locked down. Some places/cultures have fared quite well with them at certain critical moments. In theory, they all should work if people reduce their circulating exposure. Why they don't work is often a measure of compliance. And that's the tricky part.
That's not so much the lockdown as the people in it. Just like a fiat currency has no value except for the people who believe it has value.
So you can say that many cultures are a complete fail at lockdowns as a measure of effectiveness. But if your culture fails at it where others have succeeded, you really do need some alternative measures unless you want to break the back of your healthcare system and increase the fatality rate of every nose-blow and fall down the stairs.
The US under Trump has followed the typical American model: don't tell me to exercise or eat healthier to fix my obesity, give me a pill. Vaccines and vaccines alone. Except vaccines alone is a vulnerable strategy too. You need more tools in your arsenal, like effective testing and tracing programs. And you also need a public that actually follows some public health guidelines.
Yeah, yeah, here comes the government overreach parade ... telling us we have to wash our hands and wear masks because that's the gateway to The Great Reset and George Soros implanting chips to control our brains. But if you crap in your gutter and never wash your hands, nobody and no government is going to save you or your neighbors. And if you claim the government has no right to tell you what to do, you may as well store explosives in your basement and screw your neighbors. Because voluntary compliance hoping people do the right thing results in the Capitol being stormed.
Even mask stuff is funny. Now out of nowhere we see Germany asking to wear specific masks and those cheaper ones don't count now.
The market is flooded with bogus masks though. Wearing a flimsy mask made by an opportunist just plays into the narrative that masks don't work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent-we-wearing-better-masks/617656/