In Southern California, surfers were arrested for surfing on an empty beach. Parks were closed. This was hailed as a safety measure. I suspect these sorts of policies are what GP was talking about, rather than vaccines or masking.
But we were not that country. If the front door is wide open and there's a large sign above it saying "Free stuff - take what you want" because your spouse wants to embrace minimalism and throw away all your joint belongings, then triple deadbolting the back door and installing security cameras are not effective measures to protect your belongings.
There are other policy areas where states can experiment with "Red state" vs "Blue state" policies and compare how they perform, but pandemic spread is not one of them. The most permissive line of defense is the decision that has been made for everyone, and all it takes is one person (we used to call these 'bioterrorists', now we call them 'Presidents') to decide to "get this over with before the election", and it renders any other sensible precautions moot.
Areas where very aggressive precautions were implemented to counterbalance reckless policies elsewhere... didn't do that. You can't do that, without a very strong quarantine around the different policy regions.
This does not offer any commentary on the idea of sensible precautions, in a vacuum. The politicization of COVID that happened very rapidly didn't need to occur, and it did not occur in most other pandemics in this country, or in many other countries during COVID.
Generally there's a fine for being caught sleeping on the beach I think, but that's really to discourage people being swept away.
Mere weeks later public health authorities encouraged this sort of behavior (going to the beach or the park with ample space between individuals). It seemed a relevant example of "pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns"