New Zealand did both, and both worked - it did delay the inevitable, but that allowed time for the population to become vaccinated, for supplies of PPE to build up, for hospitals to build ICUs etc, and provide time for the virus to change to the much-less deadly omicron (delta and alpha never spread widely in NZ - we avoided all of that). Per head of population, our death rate was lower than almost any other country in the world. And we enjoyed an entire year of normal life between the successful elimination of alpha/delta and the eventual emergence of omicron while the rest of the world suffered. All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice, and you'd be hard pressed to find a significant number of New Zealander's that think now that the better strategy would have been to 'let her rip'. Of course you can find personal examples where lockdowns/border closures were a worse outcome for some people (I have a friend whose brother was unable to see his dying father), but being able to quote examples like that doesn't refute the strategy, because we only have to look to other countries to see what the alternatives were - a much, much, higher death rate. You say "the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe", but you don't say what that country was - did it have a lower death rate than NZ did?