All it takes is for one person to start the virus up again and the entire country has to go back into lock down.
They're playing a permanant game of country wide lockdown whack a mole with the virus.
No one can ever get comfortable again until herd immunity is reached which lockdowns delay.
However, it's much easier to test, trace and isolate small outbreaks ("whack a mole") than if its widely spread and uncontrolled.
Recently we had a single case of a school child that went back to school before they should have. Two days after he tested positive, the following happened:
* The school was closed and deep cleaned
* Close contacts and close contacts of those contacts went into quarantine. This ended up being approximately 800 people.
* All of them were tested within 48 hours and even further contacts (not "close") were also tested to the point that approximately 5000 tests were done and no additional cases were found.
You can't do that tracing and isolation if there is wide community transmission.
People go to the grocery store and come into contact with hundreds of people in an hour.
The infectious dose of COVID is not known, but believed to be somewhere in the several hundred to a thousand viruses range.
An infected person breathing normally near you might expose you to something like 20 or 30 per minute (breath is normally expelled with low force, so it doesn't contain viruses from the lower parts of the respiratory tract). Talking might do around 200 per minute. A cough or sneeze can do millions.
Thus, if I have COVID and go shopping at the same time you do, wearing a mask, and don't cough or sneeze pretty much in your face when we happen to pass each other, you almost certainly are not going to get it from me, and it makes little difference for contact tracers to find you.
It is the people that I spend a few minutes talking face to face to or that I spend a long time near that contact tracers need to find.
Note that it doesn't depend on who you get the viruses from. If a lot of people in the grocery store have it, then even though you might only get a handful of viruses from each person you pass you still might accumulate an infectious dose during your time in the store.
To control it, you need to get the number of infections down enough that people won't be getting it from casual transitory contact, like when grocery shopping, and people need to limit situations that involve more extended contact to times/places where the people they have extended contact with can be identified and traced, and need to limit the frequency of those events so that there is time for contact tracing to work.
You could have stopped there.
Where I currently live in BC (Canada), there have been more overdose deaths than coronavirus deaths in 2020[0]. It might be the case that the overdoses have increased precisely because of lockdown. It might also not be the case. That remains to be investigated.
I think it's superficially easy to blame suicide, overdose, domestic violence etc on the lockdown, but that's hard to prove, because who's to say it's not a reaction to the overall situation of people dying of a brand new disease?
Personally, I really resent lockdown/movement restrictions and I think it's a garbage policy, right back from when I lived in China during the initial outbreak. However, I also have to admit that the countries that locked down seem to have successfully knocked this virus on the head, whereas those that didn't are still suffering the effects. Perhaps a lengthier lockdown pain at the beginning is better than this drawn-out shitshow of half-assed measures that other countries are going through? I dunno.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/overdose-dea...