All badness is the realm of morality and politics, not science. Science can predict how many people will die, it can't weigh this up against other consequences. Science can't make moral judgements, only inform them.
>"Lockdown badness" is something that is the result of poor government policy and actually has solutions--it is not immutable scientific fact.
A big part of the lockdown badness is the economic damage. This is an immutable economic fact: stopping most people working will mean fewer things are produced, and more of the existing things and infrastructure will be consumed. This translates into worse standard of living and quality of life for people. Weighing this against the health damage from the virus is a matter of politics/ethics, not of science.
What we can see clearly is countries with no widespread forced closure of businesses, like Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Sweden, are having much better economic outcomes compared to countries with strong lockdowns like the US, France and Italy (expected yearly GDP growth of ~0%, vs ~-5% for the lockdown countries).
As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5...
See any of those dividers in the US? Yeah, no, you can't even get people to put masks on.
Japan seems to be cooking the books because of the Olympics even though that's simply not going to happen.
Sweden is about to pass the US in cases and deaths per capita and is right about the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net). Not sure that's counts as better than the rest of the EU--we'll see if it continues.
Your economic claims are dubious.
The primary difference is how fast a country reacted, not how hard. The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.
>As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5....
But they didn't mass-close businesses. That's what causes the economic damage.
>the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net
You sure about that? https://www.dw.com/en/as-coronavirus-lockdown-eases-italians... , https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/23/unrest-hunger-and-hardsh... .
> The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.
Required by what? Sweden hasn't "reacted" harder and the spread of the virus is already slowing there: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Brazil&location=Ca...
You've now left the realm of science and entered the realm of politics.
The "badness of the lockdowns", however, is not a given and varies depending upon the competence of your government and the idiocy of the people.
Yes, everybody locked WAY down at the beginning. However, governments that had universal healthcare and actually paid unemployment benefits to their people had far less "lockdown badness". People in those conditions weren't forced back to work in order to get food or healthcare.
In addition, those who actually locked down (R0 < 0.8) had cases that dropped substantially and can now reopen with contact tracing and efforts that aren't quite so invasive.
This is opposed to those who really just "sorta" locked down , whine about wearing a mask, etc. (R0 about 1.0)--see: Santa Cruz county being able to trace more than half of their cases to two Mother's Day gatherings.
"Lockdown badness" is something that is the result of poor government policy and actually has solutions--it is not immutable scientific fact.
Whether political leaders will implement those solutions is a different question.