>Lockdowns flattened the curve, care improved, mask wearing improved, and overall better hygiene, particularly at nursing homes.

Comparing places with and without lockdowns there's actually little evidence that lockdowns led to a reduction in mortality: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/social-distancing-more-imp.... What was associated with a reduction in mortality was social distancing.

This is a really difficult causal inference to make. There are so many confounding variables, from quality of healthcare to age demographic of infection, etc. It's also noisy. A nursing home getting infected and many older folks dying can completely spike the numbers. So I pretty much don't trust their statistics, especially if they are reporting 3 significant figures like "7.49 days doubling the number of fatalities". Even just misaligning the starts of the exponential growth phase of curves (does it begin at 1 case per 100k, 5, 100?) can throw this way off.

Lockdown was due to being unprepared. It's a long time since nearly all nations opened up again, though measures vary wildly and is researched on.