The length of lockdowns is the problem, here in Germany at least. An even harder lockdown limited in length would have most likely achieved better control of the pandemic than the on-going half-measures and we would have been out of it earlier as well.
The interdependence of humans means that no lockdown could be hard or long enough and the independence of humans means that nobody would actually live under such a hypothetical regime anyway (starting at the top especially). As it stands the worst of both worlds was erected, a lockdown too soft to effectively “eradicate” the virus and too hard to prevent the economic and psychological ills that have predictably presented themselves. The bright spot is that the anticipated deaths due to over utilization of healthcare resources seen in northern Italy has been mostly avoided. Maybe the worst of both worlds has been the least bad option.
It already worked fine during the first lockdown last year. At the end we were down to numbers at which tracing contacts and quarantining them worked quite fine for a while. This would have been an acceptable level where people would have been able to do quite a lot of things but not everything. A lot of people overdid it though. Parties, weddings, ... if nothing had ever happened. Unfortunately the response was slow and weak. Now we still deal with the consequences.
The problem with a harder lockdown limited in length is that Germany is a member of Schengen, so even if Germany largely eradicated COVID within its borders, it could then be reimported from another EU country that hadn’t been as locked down.
You might advocate for Germany closing its borders earlier and for longer, and forcing police registration of fellow Europeans, but personally I think that is horrible. I see restrictions on free movement in Schengen and challenges to European integration as much more of a problem in the long term than COVID morbidity.
I am as pro-European as they get but what should we do when things go downhill as they did in e.g. Belgium or Czechia? We have no influence on preventive measures there. All we can do is to deal with it and to be as little affected by it as possible. Beside that, a more fine-grained control than national borders would be preferrable anyways in that case, so it would be not only be about locking fellow Europeans out but fellow Germans as well. There is no base in law for that though and attempts to limit visits between federal states have therefore been anulled by courts. Can we agree that it is not an easy situation?
