I'm curious which countries you think are exemplars of good policy and how those policies mapped to their outcomes. For starters, I would set aside islands and China as special cases that may not easily replicate.
For some countries that did well, it's hard to understand what common factor may have led to their success. Some policies, at the very least, clearly delayed infections, but may not have indefinitely prevented them. However, thanks to the subsequent availability of vaccines, those delayed deaths became locked in to the extent the populace embraced vaccination. So looking at pre- and post-vaccine mortality may reveal more about vaccine uptake rates than anything about the detailed policies, without a lot of detailed statistical work.
In some areas, there seemed to be persistently lower infection rates and death rates than other areas: Japan, the Nordics, Canada, some of Southeast Asia. It's possible to squint at that Rorschach test and come up with whatever explanation strikes your fancy.
In other areas, case and death counts are low, but we should have very little confidence in official stats (India, where excess death estimates [at least 4 Alaskas] put the overall per-capita death toll at levels only modestly lower than the US)--and in sub-Saharan Africa, there is also the significant confounding factor of very low median age (~19 years, versus mid-thirties to early forties in Europe + US, etc., and as we know, covid risk increases exponentially with age).
To me, the answer doesn't look simple, and is certainly multi-causal. Policy differences surely play a role, but it does not seem obvious outside of a tiny number of extreme examples that the differences are primarily due to policies versus policies + some combination of one or two dozen other factors, many of which are not directly controllable. I just hope that simplistic analysis doesn't end up justifying policies of questionable value that lead to absurdities like this.
I absolutely agree with you that there aren't easy answers, that causes are many, and that policy only takes you so far. Things are even more complicated by the fact that policies changed, and countries that did well could then go down, or vice versa. However, I don't think there is a reason to believe that policy is absolutely useless, and we should just lay down and let the virus run its course.
I also agree that as policies are concerned, pre- and post-vaccine periods are two very distinct phases, and we need to look at death rates in them separately. it is the first phase when policies were most impactful, and where we should look at success and failure stories. Sweden vs the rest of Nordic countries is a very useful example.
For examples of a clear success, I'd look at excess deaths:
https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 (scroll about half-way down). South Korea, Norway and Denmark clearly stand out. Neither is an island (although SK is almost one). Canada, at +5%, and Germany, at +3%, look very good, and I don't see a reason why the US couldn't have been closer to Canada's 5% than to our current +19%. Each percentage point is 40,000 Americans. Even 1 PP reduction would have been very very meaningful.
People like to point out that US has a lot of unhealthy population. This is true, and it is also a policy failure, although the one that far predates Covid. But we had two huge advantages. And by huge, I mean
HUGE: access to virtually unlimited amount of money, and high number of ICUs per capita. The third huge advantage was that we were first in line for the most advanced vaccines - and we squandered this advantage in an absolutely spectacular fashion.
We tend to set the latter (low vaccination rate) aside as something beyond anyone's control, but it was not. It was 110% a policy failure of the previous administration - failure so grotesque that we now see it as, essentially, a force of nature. But it was a policy of that administration to downplay the severity of the pandemic, from Day 1 of Covid to the last day it controlled the executive branch. I can't see how a case can be made that it didn't have a very meaningful impact, from people refusing to wear masks to them again refusing to vaccinate. It absolutely, with 100% certainty, pushed our death rate up, in both pre- and post-vaccine phases.
As for the husband on the leash and a fine - yes, it is hilarious, but what is the level of badness of this policy as measured in human lives? You have to judge it against policies that left 10's of thousands of people needlessly dead.
