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I had pretty mainstream thought on Covid all the way through, so I can give you an example of my thought processes.
From what I remember, the logic (over here) went like so:
1 - We're going to get a vaccine soon, so we're going to do lockdowns and hold out until then. They suck, but we can contain the virus with lockdowns because it's virtually not in Australia.
2 - Once we get the vaccine and everyone takes it, Covid will be over and we'll return to normal life. This sucks, but it is a temporary suck that we will swiftly overcome. During this terrible time everyone needs to band together and accept the shittiness.
I'm not sure I would've supported lockdowns knowing what we know now about the virus. People were talking about a 2% fatality rate (so, what, seven million people dead in the US, 500k or so here) which is much, much larger than what we ended up with. I weighed half a million dead in my mind against a temporary restriction on my civil liberties and thought 'okay, this is the sort of situation where I can accept restricted civil liberties'.
I'm not so sure I would've accepted it in almost any other country in the world. The United States didn't have a choice to not have Covid in its borders, Australia did.
We moved on to getting the vaccine. I think at the time the claim was that vaccines stopped Covid spreading. If the option was 'zero Covid, but you have to get vaccinated' or 'Covid kills ~100,000 people (Australia, so I'm reducing the US numbers tenfold) but we don't enforce vaccines' I am in fact okay with a vaccine mandate. Mostly I'm not okay with mandating stuff like that, and as soon as it turned out that no, we weren't vaccinating ourselves back to a no-Covid world, I changed course pretty rapidly.
Vaccine mandates lagged popular opinion here - they were popular because we thought vaccine mandates would make this all go away. Lockdowns were popular because we thought they were the precursor to getting the vaccine, and, again, making Covid disappear like a bad dream. Your average person doesn't support lockdowns or vaccine mandates now, but that's because they've been proven ineffectual. China is still locking down over Covid and can't seem to accept the reality of the situation.
I think '2% of the population will die if we don't do this thing' is a good reason to consider the temporary suspension of civil liberties, and I think I'm very much a normie in that sense.
NB: I apologise if this reply seems harsh - I've tried to avoid that but see above on why I don't think straight about this.
I think this exemplifies my problem, really: it's all talked about in vague terms that can make the frighteningly insane sound perfectly reasonable.
Never mind "temporary suspension of civil liberties to save lives", which covers almost anything: how long and how bad for how many? If saving those 500000 people costs two weeks of no nightclubs, OK, I'm listening; if it costs a decade of China-style welded-indoors lockdown, no deal, molon labe etc.
But this was just never discussed. It wasn't a matter of "we'll consider these restrictions if they're projected to save at least this many lives", it was "your fundamental civil liberties are gone, you want to know what our cost-benefit analysis is, it's fuck you that's what it is".
And there's certainly no admission of failure now. If as it turns out they were crazy all along, that's critical evidence against them for the future, and I at least reserve the right to say "I told you so, clearly nobody involved in this fiasco should work in their field ever again". But it's just quietly dropped for the next Current Thing like the world didn't go insane for a few years!
I'm not 100% sure about Melbourne, but IIRC it was never banned in the Australian lockdowns or vaccine mandates to walk from your home to the supermarket, buy food, and come home with it (you had to wear a mask in the shopping centre, though, unless you had a medical exemption). This is a rather-important difference with the PRC's policies.
I was unable to go into a store to buy office supplies once because I didn't have my vaccine certificate with me, though.
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