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Governments (like all organizations) find it difficult to contextualize and manage risk. Politicians considered that it would present a major threat to their legitimacy if the public were to experience huge widespread deaths, bodies in the street, hospitals overflowing with corpses and unusable for normal functions and deaths in many or most families. This wasn’t even a problem of democracy or relative lack of control of the media, since the CCP made the same judgment.
There were undoubtedly many politicians (Boris Johnson was one) who were at least initially comfortable with letting the cards fall where they would and staying open. But politicians are naturally neurotic, and if you’re the only country that does this (Swedes ostensibly tried but they still had soft lockdown for WFH and in many other parts of the economy too) then you risk your people blaming you for every excess death. In addition, old people vote, and their middle aged children also vote more than the young. Even in China, when sporadic protests happen, they’re disproportionately middle aged and above. In March 2020 the entire global press was begging for lockdowns, and so even were many people in this very community who subsequently changed their minds.
Humans are extraordinarily adaptive and quick to accept radical change in their lives, living standards and identities (as the lifetimes of many people in eg. 20th century Europe show). Most would have been fine either way. The lockdowns were a mistake, but they were probably inevitable given the circumstances.
It also didn't help that most pandemic plans were for "high fatality, moderate infectiousness" diseases rather than "low-except-for-elderly fatality, very high infectiousness." The playbooks got thrown out very early.
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I heard a theory somewhere that the reason lockdowns became dogma is because that was what Wuhan did. By the time the virus hit the rest of the world everyone was already primed to think that lockdowns are just what you do when you get a COVID outbreak.
Is that a theory or just normal social psychology?
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Not to forget being primed before that by loads of disease-related apocalyptic fiction (sure, that stuff generally doesn't show lockdowns as something that works, but there's still indications that they would work if you just locked down earlier and harder).
You can reason by fictional evidence -- apocalyptic fiction, or by real evidence -- historical quarantine for the Black Death, but in both cases proper reasoning by such evidence would only tell you lockdowns can fail to work, not that they can work.
On the other hand, this was probably the first time in history when technological development (mainly the things enabling WFH including studies from home, also tracking etc) would have even allowed movement restrictions like the ones implemented from time to time, which is probably one of the reasons why it was only suggested and then implemented now.
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