Oh, I agree. At one point I did try to research how much good the various (non medical) mitigations did 100 years ago but didn't come up with a lot of good information. Admittedly I'm not sure how much better our handle is on that today around COVID. But we'd have almost certainly done what we had to do even if significantly more people died as a result.
Sweden is the counter example to this, they mostly didn't shut down, just took precautions with the elderly and those who came in contact with them, and did not have excess deaths compared to their nordic neighbors who did lock down....
It’s extremely hard to draw any conclusions from this. The Nordic cultural tendency to remain physically distant from strangers is so pervasive as to have been a meme long before COVID. You wouldn’t expect as strong a comparative effect between countries. Not to mention the general collectivist attitude which almost certainly yielded different baseline behaviors than, say, Florida’s culture did, regardless of top-down mandates.
In the UK people's behaviour changed significantly changed significantly before lockdown. The same in other countries - even places with very little concept of personal space (e.g. friends in Sri Lanka shared pictures of long, socially distancd, orderly queues).
I think you're making my point to at least some degree. There were a lot of different policies and behaviors around the world and across large countries that seem to have not made the degree of difference as a general rule that people might have hypothesized depending on their priors.
In the case of Sweden, people will counter-argue that Swedes aren't overly social anyway and people did take precautions so the end result was sort of the same for all the hubbub. Is that true? Don't know.
Different diseases, different population sizes/densities, different world environment, different healthcare capabilities. I'm pretty sure there's no way to say with any confidence that had most people just been forced to get on with their lives, fatalities would have been X% worse (assuming an otherwise equivalent outbreak in 1997).
