Strictly speaking I agree with your comment, but there is a lot of framing I think needs to be added. The basic form of the implied argument here is [a bad thing was predicted], [we acted], [the bad thing didn't happen] => [the action helped]. That isn't a sound argument.
1) If social distancing were left as an advised and voluntary measure, what would the impact have been? Because that would have probably captured the same benefits without violating basic human rights (particularly the right to assemble, but also a few others).
2) The modelling that justified the lockdowns turned out to be imagining a disease far worse than COVID turned out to be. It is open to question what a collapse of the hospital system would look like in practice. Or indeed if it would have happened.
3) As far as I'm aware there isn't reliable evidence of the magnitude of lives saved or lost. We seem to have come out of COVID into a geopolitical situation that could be mistaken for the opening phase of a world war - a lot of damage was done by the COVID-era policies. If there is evidence that level of authoritarian policy was justified it isn't being waved around in this neck of the woods.
1) It was an extremely contagious disease that killed people of all ages basically at random unless you were under 20. We didn't know a lot about it, especially at the beginning. Extreme measures were warranted because we were in a state of emergency. Everyone paying attention who wasn't an ass hole understood this.
2) Do you have actual sources and analysis for this claim? I'm not trying to be a jerk here and say "source pls", but a lot of people did die, a lot of hospitals did fill up, and in places like Italy early in the pandemic, we did see it get pretty bad.
3) Even if we only had ballpark estimates here, we know millions of people died due to this disease. We also know that regardless of how we responded, our global economy was dependent on international trade and countries in Europe and China closed down regardless of what the United States did.
Covid was always going to damage the global economy and inflame a whole cornucopia of dangerous idealogies. I'm glad we chose to act instead of pretending the problem would work itself out. Maybe it would have but it probably would have killed a shit load more people on the way out.
Not sure if this is a fallacy but if not it should be:
It is IMO a logical error to judge the decision making of the past with data points from the present.
So the question is: with the data the decision makers had back then and time pressure what would have been a better decision process? Highlight: with the data that they had back then, not with the data we know now.
On the contrary, using present information is the only way to evaluate wheter past decisions were the correct ones and what to change in the decision making process to improve future decisions.
1) If social distancing were left as an advised and voluntary measure, what would the impact have been? Because that would have probably captured the same benefits without violating basic human rights (particularly the right to assemble, but also a few others).
2) The modelling that justified the lockdowns turned out to be imagining a disease far worse than COVID turned out to be. It is open to question what a collapse of the hospital system would look like in practice. Or indeed if it would have happened.
3) As far as I'm aware there isn't reliable evidence of the magnitude of lives saved or lost. We seem to have come out of COVID into a geopolitical situation that could be mistaken for the opening phase of a world war - a lot of damage was done by the COVID-era policies. If there is evidence that level of authoritarian policy was justified it isn't being waved around in this neck of the woods.