Of course, we can't do that. We can only overcorrect every time and vacillate between two extremes of stupidity. It's more American than apple pie and baseball.
We lost some family members in assisted living facilities during the COVID pandemic who likely died much earlier than they would have due to isolation. It sucks, but I also understand that during the first and second year of the pandemic there was a great deal of trial and error trying to figure out how to handle things best, and there is never going to be a solution that is 100% perfect for everyone.
Don't forget how many old folks in New York assisted living facilities died due to contracting COVID in the early days. Nowhere to store the bodies, there were so many. Understandably, the response was to lock down those facilities around the country as the disease was becoming more widespread, and there is no doubt, based on those early numbers, that many lives were also saved because of this. How anything got done at all, given how dysfunctional the federal and most state governments were/are is kind of amazing.
But yeah, the response wasn't perfect. How could it possibly have been? It's hilarious for people, especially Texans of a particular political bent, to be complaining about what went down as if they were being oppressed when their man was in the white house and their other men were in the governor's, lieutenant governor's, and AG's offices. Who exactly was oppressing them? Mean people on Twitter?