I don't understand these half assed measures. The original goal was to shut everything down to explicitly flatten the curve and not swamp hospitals. That was the fear, the exponential curve of millions on millions dead in a few weeks time if this wasn't contained, but as we have seen, this is simply not happening. Yes, this virus is bad, it is highly contagious, it kills people and deserves a serious response to control, but the lockdowns, at best, were to slow the spread and a stop gap to larger secondary effects.
This is the third rail of Covid discussions. But you are correct. The area under the curve was exactly the same in all the "flatten the curve" vs zero mitigation models. The rationale behind flattening the curve was never to decrease the absolute number of infections.
But somewhere along the way, the goalposts were implicitly switched from "flatten the curve" to "wait for the vaccine"
Because everyone realized that compliance beyond lockdowns is piss poor. Mask wearing is political and people can't preform simple hygiene to avoid spreading. Once the curve was flattened it was abundantly clear that any reopening was going to follow with an explosion of cases, which it did.
