The whole thing shows how dangerous and stupid panic can be. There was a lot of media freakout, because drama drives audience. That's where the public health people should have been saying "it's serious but not catastrophic, take a deep breath". And that's where our government and citizenry should have taken a long, hard look at what these recommendations involve. Instead we dove into an extended exercise in groupthink.
Because Covid's broad parameters were known to the experts and attentive laypeople in February 2020: spread through the air and quite infectious, but not particularly serious to a healthy individual. The importance of risk factors was strongly expected but not known for a fact. Analogies to the Spanish Flu were drawn, and dismissed by the experts.
And the expert response was basically "this one thing is more important than anything else, and minimizing it takes priority over all other concerns". Anyone asking questions of their recommendations, never mind criticizing them, was labelled as anti-science. The "expert" response to serious and informed questions, some of them from excellent medical people, was dismissive and condescending.
But it was obvious that its spread could only be slowed, not stopped. It was clear at the start of "Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread" that the facts on the ground would be pretty much the same after as before. So the logic leading to the first fifteen days would lead to the next fifteen days, and so on. But because the first lockdowns were supposedly just two weeks, their cost was minimized. No one spoke up to the obvious logic of their perpetuation.
Our public health experts failed to push against the fears, and failed to address the obvious consequences of their recommendations. They failed to honestly consider and respond to questions from other scientists, who, if not "public health experts", certainly had the training and intelligence to pose serious questions. And we, as citizens and in our government, failed to question those experts, and to conduct a proper layperson's analysis of their technical statements. All in all, a very poor performance by all of us.