And even then, the odds of successful containment are pretty low.
We can decide to take the loss and let most people get infected, or we can be super aggressive about lockdown and contain it. Instead, we seem to have a compromise which is seems to take the loss, but slower with a porous lockdown which will have to last indefinitely. Now the other worlds are imagined in my head, so this may not be the case, but it is hard to look at e.g. New Zealand and not be frustrated by America's response.
p.s. I don't think Americans collectively decided anything about what options we would use to combat the virus. The federal executive branch effectively decided to do nothing, or nothing coherent and consistent, and states have individually scrambled to come up with their own responses, with varying levels of effectiveness.