When I talk about "lockdowns", I want to split it up into a few separate instances.
1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation.
2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place.
3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up.
When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down.
No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?
I really wish it would be possible for us to stop using the word "lockdown" when talking about the USA. There was pretty much no meaningful lockdown in the USA. Maybe in NYC briefly, but that's about it. Throughout the pandemic, people were (and still are) going out, horsing around, shopping at the many "essential" businesses that never actually closed, eating at the restaurants that "bravely defied" orders, drinking at the pseudo-secret bars that stayed open, singing inside crowded churches with no HVAC systems, protesting and marching in massive crowds... all consequence-free. And, no matter where you were in the country, you could get in a car, travel 100 miles to any rural area, and find everything to be fully open. Lockdown didn't work because we never tried it.
The stay-at-home "orders" were more like suggestions: completely unenforced. How many people got any kind of penalty for traveling during stay-at-home? A dozen in the entire country at most? Police have no trouble pulling over speeders and drunk drivers, but suddenly it's impossible enforce stay-at-home? Governors were all talk and no action.
The only thing that actually consistently happened were public school closures, because the government itself runs public schools. Everything else was half-assed, where the government was just begging/hoping that companies would voluntarily close their doors and that people would voluntarily stop spreading the virus around. That never happened, and the federal and state governments seemed to be totally powerless to make it happen.
In the USA there was a lockdown across the entire country for weeks.
The only shopping people were doing were the grocery store, and even then most people weren't
Restaurants were mostly closed, other stores were closed.
Some essential stores started open but only had a few customers at a time.
Yes it wasn't the lockdown China had where you couldn't leave your house for two weeks, but it was definitely a lockdown
I agree to a point. The government could never actually restrict the actions or movements or individual citizens, all they could do is make strong suggestions because anything more would be a minefield of constitutional rights violations.
But while the government can't order you to stay home, they can order a business to close. And by that metric we were under a lockdown because going about your life like before was impossible. Can't go to the gym, can't go out to eat, can't go hiking or to the beach if you live in LA. It wasn't a lockdown on individuals so much as it was a lockdown on just about everything else.
LA and NYC are some of the densest cities in the States. 12.5% of the US lives in California. Tons more people in close proximity for a virus to tear through than in a hollowed-out former manufacturing city in the Midwest.
True. It's also the type of restrictions that were in place. I think the most egregious was LA closing hiking trails. I get if you need restrictions in the densely populated portions, but closing hiking trails? It seems like whoever made the rules was more concerned with exerting control rather than public health.
I'd argue with #1. It was obvious at the start that this thing could at best be slowed, not stopped, and that conditions on the ground after would be the same as before. And thus the logic of lockdown #1 lead inevitably to #2, and so on.
That was where the "experts" should have been saying "look, there really isn't a lot we can do, outside of drastic measures that could do as much harm as help." But everyone wanted to Do Something, and the experts didn't want to seem impotent, and we proceeded thoughtlessly into a mistake.
1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation.
2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place.
3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up.
When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down.
No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?