COVID policy should have been about LOCK OUT, not LOCK DOWN.
Lock people OUT of the riskiest spaces for a bit, by canceling schools, closing restaurants and bars, banning mass events and clubs and getting people to WFH and stagger commutes for a while--sure, these things were probably essential.
Get people to wrap up warm, get the thermos bottles out and get outside/get people to understand that outside air is basically safe. You can exercise and take the kids out to play as much as you wantbut do it outside. Either stick to yourselves as a family OR bubble up with one other household. This could have been done right the way through. It would have helped avoid some of these disastrous impacts on mental and physical health.
And reduce transmission within households and in workplaces by pushing ventilation as hard as possible, and by offering voluntary hotel quarantine to people, together with clear messages about how this can help keep more vulnerable family members safe, especially if you live in a flat or small house and have a shared toilet. Cases of infectious disease caught at home are the worst, because people get exposed to such heavy doses of virus if they are locked in with infected family members and breathing in their fumes all day long (think of chickenpox--the second sibling always gets it worse).
Zoe data showed clearly that most people were getting ill from household contacts--yet no effort seemed to be being put into actually stopping this. Everyone was too busy arguing about whether you were "allowed" to cycle as your daily exercise, or shaming old people for sitting down on a fucking park bench in the fresh air while taking a walk, or creating imaginary scenarios about people spreading the virus by touching gate posts or kids touching the sand in a sand pit!