Africa: Hot climate, poor testing, data likely not accurate
Australia: Island, hot climate, pretty heavy travel/quarantine restrictions
New Zealand: Island, rural with very dispersed population, heavily restricted international travel
People may argue that the UK is also an island but fared much worse. To that I would say 1) Much colder climate 2) did not heavily restrict travel like AUS and NZ did.
At least one study was done in Florida comparing counties that had mask mandates vs those that did not. The general conclusion matches your observation, mask mandates did not appear to have a material effect on any covid related metrics (infections, hospitalizations, deaths, ect.)
This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and definitely won't wear one if not forced to.
From my perspective it is pretty clear that masks did not have a large enough protective effect to show up in aggregate data.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
If you want to look at the data yourself, I would highly recommend the following site run by a prof at University of Illinois (use the population normalized graphs): http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Having a hard time finding the primary study I mentioned but I have provided links with some (population normalized) data below.
As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.
Where in the data can you see this? Lockdowns don't appear to work. If they did, then places that didn't use them or cancelled them very early would have had drastically higher numbers than other places that kept them and the curves would be clearly moved around. But that isn't visible in the data.
That said, I'm glad you posted those links and agree with you on the lack of effectiveness of mask mandates. I've been posting links like those and various other studies for the past year because it was clear within weeks that these measures weren't having any impact. Sometimes those posts got upvoted but mostly, down down down. Very interesting that the top comment on this thread is one pointing out that lockdowns and mask mandates don't work: it used to be quite the taboo to point that out in this forum. And just recently there were the threads about the WIV, where again, many posts that a year ago would have been sitting at -4 and near-unreadably gray were sitting near the top. It's good to see that some rationality is returning to these discussions, because the data is public and easy to browse. It's not hard to flip through a bunch of countries and observe that you can't figure out when lockdowns/mask mandates started/ended with any reliability by looking at the data, even though affecting the data is the only justification for those measures' existence.
I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that. They certainly didn't stop transmission but they may have blunted the rate a bit.
I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.
I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that.
If you remember, please do post so I can take a look. Because, the evidence I've seen is all completely unambiguous and resolves the question completely in favour of "lockdowns do not work and have no effect". And actually there are now many simple examples of that, of places where restrictions were not applied, or were applied much less strictly, or were lifted, and no differences were observed in outcomes (e.g. Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Belarus, Japan etc).
It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective".
If that were the case then sudden behavioural changes caused by mask mandates should reliably cause graphs to drop or obviously inflect to a lower growth rate. That should happen everywhere mask mandates come in and are well enforced (which they are, this has been measured). But we don't see that. Of course you can cherry pick a few graphs where there seem to be such inflections, but when you look at lots of them it becomes clear there's no correlation with anything.
I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.
I see people wearing masks outside all the time, as well as in empty cars. Health 'experts' say nothing about any of this. So, I'm pretty sure lots of people do believe that unfortunately :(
A) Japan has a more temperate climate
B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days
C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.