Strict lockdowns, if properly followed or enforced, do help to get the number of cases down. They are no panacea though. They help to reduce the number of cases

Strict lockdowns, if properly followed or enforced, do help to get the number of cases down. They are no panacea though. They help to reduce the number of cases in short term but they absolutely need to be followed up with other action. Germany has an extensive contact tracing scheme in place that allowed us to find and quarantine as many contacts of infected people as possible. This limited spread and is why we fared better than others so far. The relatively low numbers gave a false sense of security unfortunately which lead to increasingly risky behaviour of people. Currently, we are seeing a rise in case numbers, albeit not as bad as in neighbouring countries which easily report multiple times the number of cases per 100000 inhabitants and week. Local health authorities are slowly reaching their limits with contact tracing at the moment, this is why measures similar to lockdowns are used locally to get them back under control. The Bundeswehr, that is the german military, also trained a few thousand soldiers to support local health authorities with their tracing work, so all is not lost yet. Turns out that having a large number of decently organized people that are easily deployed to where they are needed are a good thing, after all ;)