Well yeah, what we should have done is complete lockdowns. Close every business except grocery stores and hospitals, those businesses are to remain open with minimal staff for a period of two to three weeks. Let the virus run it's course, then fade away.
The real reason why Covid was as big of a deal as it was is two-fold.
1. Mix messaging, no state or even county maintained a uniform or consistent mandate for shutdowns or whatever. So states that shutdown got pissed because other states didn't. If we all could have just been on the same page for once in human history for just a few weeks, this wouldn't have been a big deal.
2. The places Covid got into where the worst places, namely nursing homes. And because the virus was ripping through old people like the grim reaper, it not only made the media hype up how deadly the disease was, it started a whole fire of bullshit in terms of the shutdown resistance and even the vaccine resistance.
Then you have to also consider something else. China is still fucked up by this thing. Whatever you read or see from China is almost certainly a lie. My factory in Shenzen is under total lockdown by the government. They wont let anyone in or out of the town because of covid, so the truck drivers can't get to the factory to bring shipments to the port. Anyone who tries to enter or leave without explicit government authorization is shot and killed. My factory even warned me to not place any orders with them for another 5 months because the government wont let them work more than 2 hours a day two days a week with a skeleton crew as most employees live outside of town. No factory can operate like that.
Honestly I really think that it might have been a better course to take to never impose lockdowns or anything. After all people didn't listen to them anyway, and it only shutdown businesses that couldn't really afford to shutdown in the first place. Not to mention the incredible overspended from the government to give bail outs to billion dollar businesses instead of giving it to the people who couldn't fucking work anymore.
They asked people to turn off their lives, with zero promise of anything in return. Instead people saw numbers in which 99% of people dying were the elderly. And that obviously angered people.
Again, the messaging was just fucked, and the next time a pandemic happens we better pray it isn't an even bigger killer virus because we are fucked.