Experts don’t get to make policy decisions. Ever. That isn’t their job. Our reaction to covid was living proof of why that should never, ever happen.
And they didn't.
Sadly, policymakers in the US didn't listen to them too closely either, and prefer to use COVID as a weapon for their tribalist wars, so here we are, with over a million death.
Many other developed nations had better outcomes with stricter measures, and here you are, arguing that it doesn't matter because, whatever?
In China, 10% of their population got COVID.
In the US, it was more than 35%.
Even if you just look economically, the US set itself back massively with supply chain and labor issues we will be dealing with for decades because of it.
Our numbers are basically the same as any other country on earth. The truth is you can’t contain or control a highly infectious respiratory virus no matter what “The Experts” or politicians claimed. And even if we could have, that doesn’t make any of the draconian mandates okay. Even if we did absolutely nothing the numbers would have been basically the same, only we wouldn’t have destroyed our schools, government institutions, our local communities, the elderly, the or working class.
But hey, who cares about the costs of the mitigations. Only covid mattered. Worrying about anything else made you a grandma killer subject to all kinds of verbal abuse.
I can think of only one large country exception to this, which was China for a time (though their numbers can't be trusted) and at least as far as i'm concerned enacting those kinds of measures is unacceptable in any context for a virus that eventually would end up causing more or less the same mortality effects either way.
Much of the highly biased, often irrational lockdown obsession in the U.S (and other countries) was a deluded technocratic attempt to impose pseudoclinical fantasy on a reality that didn't conform.