[logiduck]

In addition the policies while they may not have matched what was necessary where in and of themselves a form of communication to get people to take it seriously.

There might not have been a reason to make everyone stay home, but if the only way you can get people to take a quickly evolving situation seriously is to over correct, then that is the tool you have to use.

By making the same rules apply to everyone and having such extreme responses it reduced the ability for the majority to say "yeah, its bad but it doesn't apply to me". By making everyone wear masks, it was the only way to get the people who really needed to wear the masks to do so.

The policies were extreme because the situation was extreme. People now have the hindsight, but I have lost at least 3 family members and 5 neighbors due to covid and the secondary effects. 4 of those died of ordinarily treatable causes (heat attack, pneumonia, etc), but the health system wasn't able to provide them the treatment needed because of Covid was overwhelming them.