Are you deliberately ignoring vaccination? I genuinely can't tell if I'm being trolled into a conspiracy argument or not. But just in case:

The vaccines turned an extremely dangerous pandemic into a tolerable-if-still-worrisome endemic disease. This lancet paper represents a pretty good consensus belief that vaccines saved 14M lives. Our "willingness to accept a lost cause" was informed heavily by the justfied belief that it wouldn't kill us.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Basically, yeah. "All that stuff worked".