I really wish it would be possible for us to stop using the word "lockdown" when talking about the USA. There was pretty much no meaningful lockdown in the USA. Maybe in NYC briefly, but that's about it. Throughout the pandemic, people were (and still are) going out, horsing around, shopping at the many "essential" businesses that never actually closed, eating at the restaurants that "bravely defied" orders, drinking at the pseudo-secret bars that stayed open, singing inside crowded churches with no HVAC systems, protesting and marching in massive crowds... all consequence-free. And, no matter where you were in the country, you could get in a car, travel 100 miles to any rural area, and find everything to be fully open. Lockdown didn't work because we never tried it.

The stay-at-home "orders" were more like suggestions: completely unenforced. How many people got any kind of penalty for traveling during stay-at-home? A dozen in the entire country at most? Police have no trouble pulling over speeders and drunk drivers, but suddenly it's impossible enforce stay-at-home? Governors were all talk and no action.

The only thing that actually consistently happened were public school closures, because the government itself runs public schools. Everything else was half-assed, where the government was just begging/hoping that companies would voluntarily close their doors and that people would voluntarily stop spreading the virus around. That never happened, and the federal and state governments seemed to be totally powerless to make it happen.