I was there, remember? The pubs were rammed, Boris started saying "don't do X", numbers decreased a lot, he said "we make this legal now", the world stopped.

I'm bored of debating this now so whatever, all I get online is a stream of trolls. Good luck.

(And because of travel bans. But the anti-lockdown people mostly support those because that’s the ironic position.)

In other places we weren’t nearly so concerned about shutting down pubs; actually the bad case that often happened in the US was leaving bars open (for tax revenue) but closing schools (because parents and teachers are more neurotic than bar goers).

Still I haven’t met a whole lot of people complaining they weren’t allowed to work. Our stimulus worked quite well there.

I don’t think lockdowns are necessary or reasonable in 2022 but at least, as someone temporarily in the UK, I’ll be able to get out of my local family trying to make me see some ridiculously quaint British thing called a “panto”.