Yeah, well. Melbourne needed four months non stop of one of the world's strictest lockdowns to bring cases to zero. Serbia had one of the strictest lockdowns in the spring and cases started rising again as soon as it was lifted, because it turns out that, if you require people to go to work and get their own groceries and PPE, if the density of the population is large enough, people will still get infected in stores and on public transport. And if you want them to stay indoors all the time when they're not working, they will infect all the members of their household, because of course they will, in most families there's four or five people living in one 50m2 apartment. Months upon months of that, and it's not a shock someone wants to travel, because what is the difference between sitting in your own apartment and going out for groceries and sitting in the local park at night, vs traveling 45 min in a half-empty plane (where everyone is masked up, unlike your crammed local bus) to a hotel room where you'll also go out for groceries and go out to a beach, out in the open.
Lockdowns are for places that aren't densely populated, because that's the only shot you got to bring infections close to zero, and you'd have to do them for several months, and people have lives that can't be paused for that long. Maybe early on in the crisis, people would have been more receptive to that, now a lockdown would at best be accepted begrudgingly. If there's no pause button on my rent, then there can't be a pause button on whether I go back home to visit my family again, as long as there's a plane willing to take me there. And if there's no pause button on the bar owner's/gym owner's rent, people should still go to bars if they are open, so that the bar owner can at least afford the added cost of disinfectant sprays and masks and added labor by staff. If the government is happy to pay for the costs for every bar or venue they close, then close them, but instead they were "kept open" all this time, so now the govt is not responsible if no one wants to go there and there's no events that can be safely put on in venues, and they have to close forever. If they are just forced to close during the year due to bad business, you owe them nothing. And if people do go there, then you can yell at them for not being responsible and spreading the disease during a news conference, even though there's no way to go out to eat/drink and keep your mask on the entire time. Whatever happens, it's just the people who are to blame.
There are limits to personal responsibility. As I said before, the only actually responsible thing to do is to not see anyone at all or go anywhere where you have to sit in a closed space for a while. In March that wasn't a daunting proposition, we were all shopping in advance, working from home, seeing each other over Zoom, talking about when this will all be over. Now, when we haven't seen anyone, most of us have actually sacrificed a year of travel plans and event attending plans and life plans overall, and we're looking at a year more of this, and there is still a big chance of getting infected because the only counter-measure on the table is "everyone buys their own cloths to wear over their mouths and nose and we lock down when things get really bad", I don't wanna pin this on "people going out partying and not wearing their masks and not being willing to sacrifice just one measly summer". In Germany and France there was a lot of mask wearing and personal responsibility and look at what's happening there now. That's like one bit of the picture, the other bit is that we have no counter-measures that aren't literally from 1918, and pardon me for showing my leftist ass here outside of P/R, but global capitalism hasn't exactly sprung up to come up with all these innovative technological solutions to ease a crisis like this, like we kept hearing it would in the 2010's TED Talks about hypothetical pandemic responses. A speed test was invented in August, and in a lot of countries they don't have one available for people who need them (which would solve a lot of office problems - get tested at the door, go to your factory job if you're negative), but of course freaking Kendall Jenner can get a hundred of those to throw a party. We can't even solve the problem of temporary loneliness.