Lockdown had a variety of goals but the current situation can generally be classed as a policy failure. Hospital collapse is the worst case scenario but isn’t the only goal. Other important goals include:

* keeping schools open (mostly a success)

* avoiding economic disruption (mixed, tending towards failure)

* avoiding unnecessary deaths and long run health issues (failure)

* Avoiding a second lockdown and the related uncertainty and stress (failure)

* returning to normal life (failure)

* avoiding dangerous mutations (failure)

The UK is an island and could have fairly easily done a NZ/Australia strategy over the summer when seasonality made elimination easy. Jurisdictions that made that choice are doing better on all front.

I live in one such jurisdiction (atlantic canada) and we’ve spent less time in lockdown, had a good economy, and mostly avoided deaths and hospitalizations. Seems a clear winner.

Perhaps a country in the middle of europe couldn’t have done it but the Uk certainly could have.

And no, this pretty clearly shows govts had no long run or even medium run strategy. Europe will be in rolling lockdowns till april or so, because of a premature declaration of victory in the summer.

The West simply has not demonstrated the ability to enact an actual lockdown. So we're stuck with these half-measures, that rely on minimum-wage store greeters for enforcement, and even those get protested.

> Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up?

The lockdown in New Zealand had that goal to stop it completely, and achieved it.

Also, it is in general not impossible to eradicate a contagion and suppress it completely. For example, this was done with smallpox, which is about as transmissible SARS-COV2. Smallpox has been eradicated world-wide, for a quite modest price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication