"hospitals were in fact exceptionally strained at several points last year" I've not disagreed with that. Are you conflating "strained" with "collapsed"? Here

"hospitals were in fact exceptionally strained at several points last year" I've not disagreed with that. Are you conflating "strained" with "collapsed"? Here's the definitions I'm using - very busy isn't collapse or near collapse. It's just busy. You want hospitals to be busy otherwise it means you over-built capacity. The UK healthcare system is currently in a state of collapse. People are dying in ambulances because they're sitting in queues outside hospitals. They're dying on waiting lists because by the time the hospitals can put them into surgery it's already too late. Hospital managers themselves are naming precise dates for when their entire region will "collapse" and they're using that word specifically. The cause is a combination of the general backlog caused by lockdowns, bed-blocking caused by staff fleeing care homes (forced vaccinations etc), a new WFH culture in primary care doctors, and a refusal to abandon useless anti-COVID measures inside hospitals that reduces throughput. But that's a very rare situation, rather specific to the UK, and is also quite recent. "here is a paper published in Science last year, suggesting various distancing measures produced significant reductions in transmission of COVID [1]" It wasn't published last year. It is dated 15 Dec 2020 and uses data only from the first wave. If you're going to cite scientific papers at least describe them correctly! Look, there are tons of junk science papers on this topic because academics are desperate to believe that their advice worked. This particular paper is of a genre popular just after the first wave, in which they take as axiomatic that any reduction in transmission was caused by their suggested policies and then build a model on that assumption. The model then calculates how much of the reduction came from each intervention. These papers are all invalid because the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 acted like every other respiratory virus in the world, and comes in waves that naturally peter out, was ignored entirely. It's unscientific. Later on more waves came and this idea was destroyed by the evidence, but the sort of paper you're citing wouldn't have taken that into account.