The experiences of countries that didn't lock down proves that the "restrictions" were ineffective at best and more and more it looks like they caused and are continuing to cause more harm.

Lockdowns in cities was particularly dumb. Let's lock everyone indoor, in apartment buildings with shared air systems - yup, brilliant strategy for a highly contagious respiratory virus. If the weather is nice enough for people to be outside, the more that are outside the better!

The selective enforcement driven by non-medial reasoning was even more egregious. For example, forcing small businesses to close while allowing big box stores to remain open - either the virus is deadly enough to warrant the prohibition of ALL public contact or it isn't. Same with the ridiculous posturing during the "summer of love" as if the virus was smart enough to avoid spreading at BLM protests, but deadly everywhere else outdoors.

All the lockdowns did was foster the greatest transfer of wealth from the little guys to the big guys in all of human history :p

Even the definition of "emergency" is now hopelessly devalued. The best analogy to demonstrate this that I have heard: If someone asks to borrow your car for two weeks and after two years they still haven't brought it back, they are no longer borrowing your car.

How many people ended up in the hospital on a ventilator and potentially died needlessly while the government panned ivermectin and HCQ and the media/big tech demonized, banned and flat out declared war on anyone talking about anything other than complying with ridiculous mandates and vaccination as the only solution? Going on a ventilator was a 50/50 death sentence. ANYTHING that could have POSSIBLY prevented ANYONE from ever having to go into the hospital should have been thrown at anyone willing to try it. Ivermectin and HCQ are DECADES old, given to millions if not billions of people and even if they were 100% ineffective they certainly were not going to do harm to the VAST majority of people. But here we are. People still make fun of Ivermectin with the "horse dewormer" slur. It's very common for drugs to have human and animal uses and anyone who implies otherwise is either grossly ignorant or the most evil kind of person out there deliberately distorting actual science for political/tribal reasons.

I could go on, but the parameters of the disease were well known by the March after the December the virus really broke on our consciousness. The real problem is politics and money took over. Big pharma had a risk free gravy train as long as the "restrictions" and vaccine mandates were underway. Politicians got to boss people around and make themselves even more important. The government, media and big tech blatantly collaborated in flogging the messaging in ways never before seen in human history.

Trust in government, the media and big tech is at an all time low for very, very good reasons.

What's going to be really tragic - there may be a future biological incident where there are legitimate reasons for dramatic and long term restrictions; good luck getting everyone to cooperate after the ridiculous way COVID was handled. The more evidence that keeps coming out that much of the response and overreaction to it was utterly unwarranted, the more trust is going to be eroded. The most egregious that I am just dumbfounded that here is ongoing controversy over: it's beyond criminal that ANY kids are being forced to still wear face masks. It's flat out child abuse mainly to pleasure the teacher unions.

That you seem to be implying that governments didn't take COVID seriously enough when it's beyond obvious now that the opposite is true - the vast majority of governments dramatically overreacted and probably made things FAR worse with their policies shows just how big of a disconnect remains, unfortunately.