Because our idiot President decided that his method of attacking this was to pretend it didn't exist, we never got to the stage where we really tested civil rights of a lot of these proposed maneuvers, because this nation can't even agree that COVID is a real problem. But I really don't think you would have gotten away with locking people in their homes for months, instituting mandatory checkpoints all over the country to stop people from moving from street to street and neighborhood to neighborhood, as well as forcing them to own tracking devices, all with the threat of imprisonment in the US. These ideas would have never survived conservative court challenges. You can point to other countries as much as you want, but none of them have our constitution or legal system. I mean there are cases of forced business closings being thrown out in state courts, how do you think any of this stuff would have flown in a constitutional sense here?
Obviously these methods would have controlled numbers better, but at the same time, if it isn't legal, it isn't going to fly. The biggest failure in the US was to sell this as another WW2 or 9/11 and try to unite the country behind the message that this was not only the right thing to do, it was the patriotic thing to do. Instead our idiot in chief used it as a wedge issue.