There's a kind of survivorship bias to your analysis, in that you're evaluating the damage against the result of the lockdown, the policy you're using as a variable, without factoring in the effect of that variable on the outcome. If you want to compare the cost of the lockdown to the damage of the virus, you need to calculate it against the damage that could have been caused without the lockdown.

I think that, especially during the first two major outbreaks, lockdown was hte right move despite the cost. Please remember that the death rate during the first major spikes (classic and delta) was much higher than the death rate for later strains. Without the lockdowns, infection rates would be higher and more people would have died. In addition, even with the lockdown number of victims during those two spikes overwhelmed the hospital systems in some areas. If more people would have been infected, more hospital systems would have collapsed, and a higher percentage of the larger victim pool would have died.

The first two major strains of the virus also seem to have caused long covid at a higher rate. Many of those victims are still partially disabled today, adding to ongoing economic cost. (Plus, you know, their lives suck)
 

I think the hindsight would depend on two factors: covid mortality rate in your country in 2020 and the beginning of 2021, and the percentage of people who were infected in the first few, most dangerous, waves (current mortality rates don't matter much, so it doesn't really make sense to take average).

Where I'm from, the isolation measures were nearly non-existent. Everyone I knew got covid in the first year, and mortality rate at that point was higher than 1%. The precise infection and mortality rate is tricky to figure out, but I think we can attribute excess mortality rate in 2020 mostly to the consequences of covid (direct and indirect, such as dying from something else because hospitals were overloaded), rather than to consequences of fighting it. Excess mortality rate in 2020 there was comparable to mortality rate of cardiovascular diseases, and was much higher than any other cause of death (probably even combined). That's 0.5% of population dying no matter if they were infected or not.
We can assume that other strategies were also leading to excess mortality due to other factors, but since countries with stricter measures had 2-3 times lower excess mortality, I came to conclusion that they were more efficient at preventing deaths.

Dunbar argues that people have 150-200 meaningful relationships on average, meaning that, with excess mortality of 0.5%, on average one person you know would die. You can argue that you have 99.5% to "win" by surviving covid yourself, but I'd note that losing a family member, close relative, or best friend would be a devastating loss too. So the _real_ chance of "winning" depends on how many people you care about. For most people, I'd say this number is _at least_ 4, including themselves.

By standards of XCOM players, 2% is scary odds to gamble with.
 

Yes, of course there is survivorship bias in my personal analysys. There is also my historian bias: As a historically minded person, I feel that Corona doesn’t rank very highly among other known historical plagues, from the Black Death to the Spanish Flu. But of course the pandemic you’re in feels a lot worse than some historical event nobody remembers anymore.

But would you say that absolutely every measure taken by governments was 100% right? Given the uncertainty at the time, I doubt that can be possibly true. Even government health officials today, looking back, consider school closures to have been excessive.
 

It's definitely hard to quantify which decisions were right or wrong because all we have are estimates of what could have happened if things went differently. We didn't have good data on just how deadly the virus was even at the height of the pandemic lock downs. So governments made decisions with the little information they had.

With hindsight, yes we can say things like closing schools and moving completely to online learning for a time wasn't worth the cost. But would we really want our governments to not be cautious in a pandemic scenario? What if Covid instead of evolving weaker strains had evolved deadlier ones?

One of my, perhaps irrational, fears is that we face another pandemic in my lifetime and because Covid ended up fizzling out in peoples minds Governments and people in general don't react with the same level of caution and we end up with a modern day Black Death scenario that wipes out huge percentages of the population.
 

I like to share anecdotes here so I'll share this one about the disruption caused by school lockdowns. I work as a programmer at a school district and part of my job in 2022 and 2023 was helping folks analyze pre and post covid data. We saw a 200% rise in discipline incidents across our district once in person learning resumed. Discipline incidents have dropped but are currently still higher then they were pre Covid.

We saw test scores drop anywhere from 20%-40%. Students whose test scores for reading/math were previously on grade level were all of a sudden performing below grade level. And the interesting thing is that while predictably lower performing students saw the highest drops even high performing students saw substantial, sometimes double digit, drops.

It's so bad that my state has dropped minimum test score and gains requirements almost every year since Covid and created more alternative methods for students to earn their high school diploma without meeting the state standardized test score requirements. They are now even considering eliminating the testing requirements altogether, something unheard of in my state as Republicans have championed standardized testing here for the past 25 years.