As many have said, the only real way out is a vaccine. So, until we have widespread distribution of that.
This is not true and many should stop saying it.
There are all kinds of measure that can be done to contain the outbreak. Different things when community spread is high and when it's low. It's a leadership policy decision to ignore all of those and focus on only vaccine or lockdown. It's like throwing out your entire toolbox and wondering why it's so hard to build stuff with only a hammer.
Your missing my point a bit. Not debating how we responded, merely stating that it will be interesting to see, after we're past this, how history paints our response in the decades and centuries to come.
See above. History will say a poor policy decision was made. That all hope was put in a vaccine with little else done to mitigate spread. Along with some focus on treatment instead of prevention, which is never as effective.
But to comment on your response, telling the most at risk to be extremely cautious would have been one way. Imagine taking 1.5 trillion dollars and creating the infrastructure and organizations to safely deliver food and essentials to the most at risk. Setting up things to keep their quality of life high while keeping them safe. As opposed to spending three trillion dollars to keep shuttered businesses and people that now can't work able to pay bills and buy food.
If we're going to imagine. Let's imagine that we simply paid everyone who earned a living in the services economy with activities that are no longer safe to simply not do them until we could make them safe. It's not to do nothing, it's to "not do the previously perfectly normal thing that is no longer safe because of a new public health externality".
Even better, instead of trying to isolate the "the most at risk", roughly 165,000,000 people, let's isolate the infected people until they're no longer contagious, roughly 11,500,000, more than 14 times less people.
I'm not saying our response was good or bad, we've never been in this situation before. But as someone who studies economics and the financial markets, I'm very curious to see how our responses are looked at in the years to come and the long term effects they've had.
Our response was bad. We've been in this situation before. We didn't do the things to control spread, and that spread tanked the economy. For the little that we did do, we didn't do the things to prevent those things from tanking the economy. To top it off, we acted like the short term actions done to allow time for long term actions to be implemented were all that was needed. Doing only the short team actions for the long term, never doing the work for the proper long term actions. Then, we wondered (collectively) why things didn't change when we didn't do anything to change them.
It's like putting a spare tire on when you have flat. Good emergency response. But, you don't stop there, you have to replace it with a real tire. If you just keep changing the spare every 100 miles for another temp spare, you'll never fix the long term problem.