I'm not so sure because it seems like herd immunity was able to be acquired faster through a lack of protective measure. It creates a surge in medical demand (the actual reason why COVID was dangerous), but causes effectively no after-effects because the disease is endemic and herd immunity takes hold with as less lethal strains of the virus are produced.

On the other hand, the lockdowns prevented herd immunity, and worse: guaranteed exposure in households to the virus, spreading it further while slowing the introduction of herd immunity, and disincentivizing activities that would boost immune responses, and causing people to come out of isolation and get exposed to the virus when they hadn't previously, rather than being exposed to a less dangerous strain. This effectively lengthens the time period where the most deaths take place.

You're literally flattening the curve. Instead of 75,000 Americans dying in a month, you get 150,000 dying over a year, and that's not counting the added suicides, overdoses, and crime spikes.

It reminds me a lot of The Great Depression in America which was effectively started as a tractor bubble. Policies designed to save the economy from the damage of the bubble bursting actually lengthened and economic slowdown for 12 years unnecessarily, when if nothing had been done, the American economy could have recovered within 2.

The Democrats and Keynesians "flattened the curve" of deflation, and caused the worst economic disaster in American history. After The Great Recession, these same people caused the slowest economic recovery in American history, taking about 8 years, while Wall Street was good by February of 2009.

Like I said, I'd be willing to bet that COVID deaths in the US are probably 10x higher than if we had done nothing at all.