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.
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.