In Australia, police would patrol the streets to ensure people were staying within a 5 km radius of their residence, and to ensure they were only out for a reason deemed essential by the government.
This was accompanied by international, interstate and intrastate border closures, i.e. you couldn’t enter Australia, and couldn’t enter another state within Australia if already in Australia, nor could you in some cases even drive from one part of the state to another, without a special exemption.
I hesitate to ask what Florida did to enforce the lockdowns, because I’m fairly certain what passed for a “lockdown” outside of Asia-Pacific was a joke by comparison. I strongly doubt any of the above measures were done by any state in the US at any point in the pandemic.
Take a look at the stringency index in this article.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-07/califo...
Florida locked down just as fast and just as hard as California for the first 6 months of the pandemic. After that stringency measures diverged, but Florida still maintained a range of significant pandemic control measures. Their measures in early 2021 were about as strict as California's in late 2021. Overall they were more similar than different.
It also seems that the high number of elderly people in Florida, as a group, took the pandemic very seriously. They were in fact more likely to get themselves vaccinated than elderly people in California, despite the lack of mandates.
In the end it's actual behaviour of the population that makes the difference, whether that behaviour was mandated or not. One interesting stat is that in the most pro-Trump counties (60%+ support) death rates were 2.7x higher than in the most Pro-Biden counties. In the top 10% of counties for each camp the death rate differential was 6x. At the peak of the wave in 2021 about a thousand more Republicans were dying per day than Democrats.