Well, clearly if you have a very long and strict lockdown, you would have a low death count. If you optimize for that then nothing beats a lockdown. But everything has a tradeoff. If we optimized for low death counts then we would've banned cars long time ago. But instead we allow cars but try to prevent accidents as much as we can. And just to be clear, I'm not against short lockdowns when really needed.

While the lockdowns surely helped, you can't discount the advantage of being a non-densely populated island. Iceland and Japan, for example, also have very low death counts compared to mainland Europe or America.

Vietnam and Thailand would disagree.