Even with all the data we have now, I'm not sure there's any real silver bullets. Don't just look to the US, but look everywhere. You have a really wide sample of approaches. Some countries went ultra authoritarian and forced just about every intervention imaginable - and then some beyond that, while other countries did pretty much nothing, and then you had a mixture of everything in between. Yet after all is said and done, when you look at the actual death rates - everybody tended to fall within a fraction of a percent of each other, with outliers largely due to demographic reasons. For instance India had an extremely low death rate, but that was probably mostly because they have quite a young population.

And essentially all interventions came with major costs. For a hypothetical, imagine that we know for a fact that school closures saved 5,000 lives. But you also know that you damaged the mental and social development of millions of students. Development from which it seems many of this generation may simply never recover from. It's not like there's a good choice, because both options completely suck. Of all the things we tried, it doesn't seem there was any sort of "free lunch" where you got a really significant benefit with no cost. Everything came with costs, and those costs were often extremely high.