I don't think anyone can deny the effectiveness of confinement. It sure is a sudden and big disruption in both people's daily life and economy, but since virus spread is through human contact, I can't see how it would be possible that drastically limiting contacts would not drastically limit the spread.
For you or me, or 99% of EEVblog forum participants, this is blatantly obvious. In large general public however, there are significant percentages of people who
1) Suffer from a mental block or a psychological condition of not being able to think rationally at all in such case. It's their defence mechanism,
2) Narcissist psychopaths who simply don't give a shit about the others,
3) Simply people who are too
stupid to understand, stupid not being used here as a way to belittle, but as an actual description of their cognitive skills required to reach the conclusion you or I reach.
A certain amount of such people are going to repeat the mantra about how every government overreacted, no matter how bad the outcome is. The better the outcome is (by strong actions), the larger this group will be, I guess. This limits the government's response: they fear that
what if they seem to "overreact", they lose their voter base. They want to actually
see with their own eyes that yes, the experts are right.
Needless to say, enforcing the actions by the police/military are only needed
because of these groups of people. This is why the Finnish strategy, "we only give suggestions and trust people follow them" is a catastrophe. Luckily, it seems this strategy is changing today: for the first time, we will have an actual restriction enforced by the police and military starting from tomorrow (the isolation of the hotspot capital city area).