Our species has evolved to deal with deaths. Social isolation goes against human nature, it's a lot more harmful than any pandemic.

The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more.

Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.