COVID wasn't eliminated via lockdown. New Zealand wasn't really locked down up until quite recently, they "just" closed their borders and completely screwed all

COVID wasn't eliminated via lockdown. New Zealand wasn't really locked down up until quite recently, they "just" closed their borders and completely screwed all their citizens who were outside the country at the time. That appeared to work for a while but now they're having COVID waves anyway, and when that started it turned out they hadn't really bothered vaccinating because they felt COVID wasn't a problem for them. As for other places, for some reason COVID seems less severe in east Asia in general. You left out Japan where COVID has not been particularly serious and which also used quite light measures, especially in the early days. Really, this has been done to death by now. Lockdowns don't have any effect. Some people thought they did because the natural wave pattern happened to overlap with when lockdowns were brought in and epidemiologists - perhaps the most useless form of expertise in the world - were united in believing that COVID wasn't going to be seasonal, for no obvious reason. So they just ascribed the fall in cases to their brilliant policies instead of the true cause. Once COVID came back at different times in different countries much more data became available and it started to show the truth: NPIs like lockdowns, masks, contact tracing etc were all useless. Only very early and very harsh border controls seemed to have much effect, and even then only temporarily.