By "worked" I mean "was effective at reducing the R-rate and ultimately on the effects of (a) excess mortality and (b) severest effects of C19".
By how much? If we're going to have an objective measure, the numbers cannot be subjective. We can't simply say "reducing" something. How much reduction? In comparison to the collateral costs, what level of reduction should be considered beneficial?
On your second point, what if none of it worked, that really falls into how do you prove a negative. The evidence strongly suggests that some strategies have been effective at limiting the spread of C19,
I'm genuinely curious what evidence you believe "strongly suggests" that. If anything, the evidence might suggest that some strategies were effective at
delaying the spread, and disproportionately making other people bear the burden. We called them "essential workers".
Governments all over the world told people they were "safer at home", but not for everyone. The laptop class, of which I am a member, was able to sit "safer at home" while the working class had to keep things rolling along, delivering us food and Amazon packages. They had to face the virus daily while those of us that had cushy jobs sat at home largely unaffected. There wasn't even a hint of irony when the government would say things like, "It's safer for you to get your food delivered" Maybe for the one receiving the delivery, but not for the delivery driver and the people who made it for you. It was nothing more than a new kind of caste system where we made the lowest paid employees bear the brunt of the virus while the affluent isolated. Sounds fair. All the while, we were making those "essential workers" deal with the virus to "slow the spread", which kind of worked, I guess, since the affluent weren't nearly as susceptible. It's why the poor were disproportionately harmed by the virus, not because not enough people wore masks and/or distanced properly, but because the "safer at home" policies implemented by governments the world over shifted the burden to the working class by design. We'll make the working class run around while the novel virus is circulating and isolate ourselves
from them. It's still astounding to me that people think that was OK.
though less precise about which intervetions were optimal. Globally, most governments' initial strategies - perhaps driven by panic about the unknown risks of what seemed a particularly virulent and lethal novel coronavirus - appear to have been less focused. But with good reason, IMHO - the epidemiology was unknown, and they were treating this in the way that they would treat a national security threat.
My opinion is that the government was more interested in shifting the blame to the people, so that we wouldn't talk about the foolish decisions they made that resulted in countless, needless deaths. Things like sending elderly people back to nursing homes and prohibiting them from being tested upon admission,
even if they were symptomatic. This while we knew that the elderly were thousands of times more likely to die from COVID. So they introduced masking and social distancing as a keen way to shift the blame onto
us. And dutifully, "studies" were hastily and shoddily thrown together to support these recommendations after the fact, and thus The Science™ was born.
Third, collateral. Here, we agree. It is why science can only ever inform policy, but should not "be" policy. Of course it matters that mental health has taken a battering, that other physical health outcomes have taken a huge hit (especially among the elderly or infirm), that the global economy has retracted, that businesses have closed, that education has been affected (and that educational outcome disparities have likely increased, between those who can afford decent and supportive ICT to enable remote learning and those who can't). Again, the role of politicians is to work out what is acceptable collateral and implement science-based strategies.
Which they completely and utterly failed to do.
