The rest of it is easy, because you just look at other countries that had low death rates--Australia, Singapore, Denmark, etc..

They just...listened to the epidemiologists and did what they said, accepting that they weren't omniscient but knew better than anyone else what to do. That's about it. They weren't miles off with interventions if you actually trusted them. If you asked them to cut a lot of corners because "we can't get compliance", then, well, they didn't always know which things were most important. But even within the U.S., where poor compliance prevented eradication unlike in, say, Australia, places that were more diligent about listening to epidemiologists--Seattle, for instance, with a 0.1% death rate--did well compared to places that didn't--Miami, with 0.4% death rate, or Dallas with 0.25%. (I chose both Miami and Dallas because I couldn't quickly find a city of similar size to Seattle and the same age distribution--so I picked two, with Miami having an older population and Dallas a younger population than Seattle.)

The negative side effects? Better economy, fewer deaths, better health, lower health care expenditures...wait, those are positive. The negative side effects are somewhat greater non-health-care government spending (to mitigate economic impacts) and you had to rely on government for a bit. Pretty mild overall.

How do you get good enough compliance in a country where tons of people vote for MTG, and people think "locking everyone in their homes" is a good way to describe the pandemic response? Where the virus changes, and Fauci changes his advice less than he should have given the new variant, and people still say he's incompetent because he changed his mind? Beats me.