Every offical that was selling the initial lockdown. Just have to get the R0 below 1, remember? You really think the masses would have been OK with a year of lockdowns and the despair that entails up front?

Your conclusions don't match reality. States like Florida have open stadiums and are fairing the same as states like California that insist on totalitarian overreach.

California has done somewhat better than Florida overall — and the vast, vast majority of cases in California came from Southern California, where the lockdown and mask rules were largely not followed. California is 40+ million people; it's basically two Floridas. The northern one followed the rules, the southern didn't, and you can see very clearly which way resulted in fewer cases and deaths. Northern California had one of the lowest case rates in the country. Southern California had one of the highest.

post hoc distinction

> States like Florida have open stadiums

With the exact same density as before ?

No western nation, except perhaps italy briefly, had a lockdown like the initial suggestions were.

I won't say with confidence that a short, hard, lockdown would have solved things in the us, but such approaches did work in many other nations.