I think it depends on which lockdowns you are talking about. I've been living in Germany, where lockdowns seem to happen at the time you expect them to happen

I think it depends on which lockdowns you are talking about. I've been living in Germany, where lockdowns seem to happen at the time you expect them to happen (when cases start to spike), and the deaths-per-capita are about half that of the UK, where they happened at the last minute (after cases had peaked). In countries like Korea, Japan, and China, they had very early lockdowns, and have had basically negligible Covid impact. I would really like it if everybody sat down and started consciously copying the states with approaches that worked, rather than trying to solve the problem from first principles. Public health is complicated, but what's not complicated is that some states are obviously way better at it, and these successes should be emulated.