Do you not think the better and cheaper response would've been to have temporary medical facilities just for housing covid patients and hire more nurses and doctors to treat them with better PPE. Isn't that what they did in New York back in April.
A coordinated test, trace, and isolate approach would have been vastly better. I suspect it still might. It is clear that there is no political will for it, though.
Fuck, why they haven't pushed for cheap rapid testing with limited accuracy boggles the mind. (Not really, politics insisted on "are we sure the PCR test is giving us proper positives" because people wanted to question the numbers.)
As long as it was pretty solid at avoiding false negatives it could be shit for false positives and it would still be incredibly helpful and people could self-manage. Much more effective at the population level.