As an American living in New Zealand I can attest to the fact that the Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern made mostly good moves by treating COVID seriously and thus winning re-election in a landslide. I cannot say if her decisions helped to squash COVID, but her words and facial expressions were very good politically.

I was in favor of one hard lockdown and strict border controls, and that is mostly what happened. I was not in favor of shutting down butchers, bakers, and green grocers because that just crowded everybody into supermarkets making social distancing difficult and creating long lines at supermarkets. It also crushed several businesses into bankruptcy unnecessarily, caused lots of food to go to waste, and propped up the already-too-powerful supermarket conglomerates.

NZ had extreme advantages: an island nation with easy to control borders, a large lead time to prepare, a low population density, a unified jurisdiction, no constitutional restrictions on the government's power, first world medical infrastructure, a timid compliant population that overwhelmingly just does as they are told and doesn't makes a fuss, high social cohesion, double helpings of common sense. Cowardly risk-averse and boring people that will never amount to much more than a hill of beans by American standards, but happy nonetheless [this sentence was meant as tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor, sorry if anyone was offended or took it seriously].

The US does not have the options NZ had. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to enforce a national lockdown, and even local lockdowns are being ruled as unconstitutional. And if you can't do one coordinated severe lockdown to squash it completely and then strictly close your borders requiring two week quarantines for anyone coming in... then I say don't bother with lockdowns at all. Oh, and stop blaming everything on your president.