Wide-scale (basically the whole planet) real-world human experiments and testing have undeniably revealed the following:
1) While most of the "West" have theorized about the advantage to the economy of letting the disease spread without restrictions, not a single nation, not even Sweden, have had guts to go all the way (or even close) to see if this works. The breaking point seems to be the army mass-transporting dead bodies under the windows of people. At this point, losers try the strategy of the winners, but it's too late. What that means, "economy vs. human life" is, and was from day one, a completely false dichotomy. In reality, they go hand-in-hand.
2) Statistically signicant number of nations, mostly in Asia (and Oceania), have definitely proved that strong early actions (that seem "excessively strong" or "panicking" to many at that stage) result in least death, least injury, least suffering, but also least damage to the economy, and maybe most importantly, least amount of restriction of human rights like the right to go shopping or have a coffee with friends. While most of the EU and USA is still more or less closed, people in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea or Singapore are sipping their coffee in restaurants almost normally. These nations have proved that seemingly "excessive" but scientifically rational actions which look like "panicking" to some are effective to guarantee people can quickly go back to normal life at some 90% duty cycle and don't need to suffer for 1.5 years nonstop from this shit.
Doing too little too late has clearly led to having to go to much stronger limitations than what "strong" limitations would have originally been, and also for much longer time. It is devastating to see how pretty much all of the "West" has utterly failed to understand this blatantly obvious relationship even WHO, despite all of their shortcomings, talked about from day one.
Our Western approach seems to be, panic panic panic, "no we are not panicking! need to show that off", until the death scares the shit out and then we start to visibly panic, still unable to make rational choices based on expert analysis - or even common sense.
A large handful of nations have clearly proved though all of this suffering is completely optional tragedy bought to us by our incompetent leaders, but what can we do.