None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world.

Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn't have stopped it anywhere else.

Now, what I do agree with is that the response could've been a lot better, and many lives would've been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.