I am not yet convinced that it would have been 'better' to totally shut down sooner. I do think there is still a 'herd' immunity that is a necessary factor at some point. We do need a certain amount of the population to have been exposed and to begin building up their antibodies. Maybe I understand it wrong, but I thought that was a necessity at some point.
If we had shut down the nation completely, when there had only been 11 deaths, then what? How long before we begin to slowly re-open, with an entirely unexposed, virgin population? There would still have been deaths at some point. JMO
It's very tricky as it's a brand new virus in humans. I would say that closing down sooner, and then reopening would have the same considerations that we are faced with now...that we need testing, contact tracing, and isolation/quarantine of the infected and exposed, and we don't want to overwhelm the healthcare systems. If you had all those things in place earlier on, and you had all transport into a country zeroed, then you might have a chance of nipping community spread in the bud and preventing what has happened in many countries, like the UK, Italy, USA, etc.
Doing it earlier would have meant less expenditure in the health services for all those ventilators and PPE and staff overtime, etc as the peak would have been far smaller. And you'd have less 'mopping up' of cases to do during and after lockdown.
So I would say, yes it could and would have saved lives and could have cost less money to governments....though ultimately how much the expenditure on health systems is compared to the cost to individuals and businesses probably doesn't make the financial savings all that great.
And if you can get the cases really, really, low, and get straight into those community outbreaks when they do occur, then you need less social distancing costs for the longer term, as long as you keep up with the same measures, and adapt them as new things come out, like the fast-result tests and contact tracing apps.
I feel, in response to my own question, that fewer people are looking at all of this in terms of epidemiological models and more in terms of the things they're hearing in government pressers and what they're reading in the media, where I think it can sometimes seem conflicting. It wasn't that long ago that the UK government were saying that football matches didn't have to be cancelled as there was a low chance of spreading/contracting the virus in an outdoor setting like that....fast forward a few weeks and a hundred people in a green space with 2 metres between individuals and families are castigated like they are serial killers.
So there are some things where I'm not surprised there's confusion. There are other things that I really want to understand how different people are thinking and what's leading to those thoughts and questions that they have. But sometimes it's hard to understand those things when I can only hear the 'noise' of people saying "the lockdown has been too much", or "I don't know if the lockdown has had much effect or really been necessary?" And that's what really led to my question in response to Firebird's post.