> the health care system would have collapsed
You were told that but the Swiss were told that too. In fact they were told the hospitals were collapsing, even as their own dashboard said the exact opposite.
Governments lied about COVID, all the time. Lockdowns had no impact on spread, and there's a ton of studies showing that by now, just go searching for them on Google Scholar. But you don't even need studies. Just eyeball the graphs of various countries and try to spot the impact on case numbers of these supposedly mandatory interventions. There isn't any. SARS-CoV-2 like all coronaviruses spreads like a gas and these viral clouds can hang around and travel long distances in the air. Lockdowns are meaningless given such a modality of spread.
Ireland (where I live) have one of the worst, and I followed the numbers religiously for most of Covid. Without the lockdown/other measures to reduce spread, the health care system would have collapsed multiple times (hence why we had some of the longest lockdowns in the world).
Like, my mother had cancer and suffered massively due to the lockdowns (I firmly believe it was a large contributor to her death last year) but that doesn't mean that they weren't necessary, at least in Ireland.