You would be right, except that the policy change was sudden. We went from hardliner measures like vaccine mandates (EUR 15,000 proposed fines in Austria), lockdowns, layoffs for the unvaccinated, gag orders for medical personnel up to December 2021 to almost complete freedom in March 2022.

You could watch consent manufacturing in real time as former hardliner outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic started to insert timid opinion pieces that questioned school lockdowns and masking of children.

The Ukraine invasion may also have played an additional role in getting Western leaders focus on important things again.

That seems fitting for something that became a seasonal disease.

Who is "we" in this context? This thread is descended from people complaining about American policies and speculating that Biden is trying to make us into the USSR. The US is not Austria and never had fines for being unvaccinated. Vaccine mandates themselves were never federal and can't be. It's up to individual businesses and schools and what not to decide if they care. The government itself only ever mandated vaccines for its own employees. Lockdowns were similarly never federal and mostly on a city by city basis. Some cities hardly anyone was out on the street ever and in-person services businesses were closed for a long time. In other cities, virtually nothing changed at all outside of maybe a few months immediately after March 2020. Where I live, Dallas had a "lockdown" for like three months. This ended way before Ukraine was invaded.

I mean, the quick shift makes sense with vaccine deployments and the medical community figuring out how to deal with it all happening within a few months. We went from not being equipped to deal with the disease to being equipped in a pretty short window.

If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like

Are you saying that the measures would have seemed more warranted if the phasing out of restrictions had been more gradual?

> Lockdowns appear to have been a good idea during some of the disease (i.e. before we knew how to treat it, and before vaccines became readily available), and became less important as the context changed.

Yeah, and those people have the habit of ignoring how bad things got at the start in a few countries (Italy and France come to mind, but there were others) where bodies were piling, there were military hospitals deployed in parking lots, hospitalised patients were being transported to other countries, people were dying, and there was a general lack of clarity and understanding of how to treat sick people, and importantly, lack of medical care capacity to treat them or any others (a friend had their uncle die because the ambulance took a few hours to arrive due to medical services being completely overwhelmed). Any country that looked into those countries and decided "nah, this doesn't concern us because we're better humans" was led by utterly incompetent idiots.

Did some countries overreact with their measures? Maybe, but based on the limited information available in 2020, overreaction was a better idea than doing nothing.