Would they? First of all, the criticism I mentioned was when the governent was "ahead"; experience indicates people were not "agreeing it was good to be ahead". "Ahead" in this case may be shutting down the economy far more than is justified. While it may be fun to talk about "the rich" and stuff, remember that "the economy" is what feeds all of us, clothes us, houses us, and keeps us in electricity and clean water. It is even now not necessarily clear that we aren't "ahead", once you put aside the partisan political sniping, and doing ourselves much greater damage than is actually justified. Thousands of deaths are bad, but a 30% employment rate (and presumably growing) is going to be bad too. I am not implicitly claiming one is worse than the other... I'm saying right here, right now, we don't actually know.

The "correct" response is an exponentially small target. Right now in the fog of war we don't even know what it would be. It would fit the evidence that the coronavirus fatality rate really is sub-.5%, if you count all the asymptomatic cases that may exist, and that we're badly overreacting. It would fit the evidence that coronavirus is still, if anything, downplayed, that there is no reserve of asymptomatic cases, and that even if it doesn't kill you there will be a generation of people crippled by it just like there was by polio. The nastier end of the rumors I'm hearing are really nasty [1]. It will only be visible in hindsight.

[1]: Can the virus kill the part of the brain responsible for determining whether or not you have enough oxygen in your blood, and then also kill your lungs, so that you think you're recovered and doing well and everything's fine even as your blood oxygen level sinks until you just keel over dead? Is that what the videos of people literally keeling over dead in the streets of China were? Dunno. Won't know for a while yet. But if it can do stuff like that, it could be a scar on us for the rest of our lives. Or that could be something else entirely, up to and including some intelligence agency's way of fearmongering. Heck if I know. Maybe it is ultimately just a bad cold that tends to cause pneumonia and everything else is just the Internet doing its echo-y thing. Zoonoses (diseases that jump the species barrier) have a history of that sort of thing.

1 week early and you end up with 1% of deaths as other countries and complaints that "too much was done", then when people rebel against the lockdown after a few weeks, deaths shoot up again.

1 week late and you end up with 100 times the deaths as other countries