Ultimately, none of the societal restrictions really helped reduce the portion of the population that caught covid -- given enough time, it ended up rounding up

Ultimately, none of the societal restrictions really helped reduce the portion of the population that caught covid -- given enough time, it ended up rounding up to 100%, almost worldwide. Restrictions and masking really just bought us some time and slowed the process of getting to "everyone got infected". Even China, New Zealand, Australia, etc failed at zero-covid given enough time, and covid raged once it got out. Different states in the US with vastly different policies ended up with the same final outcome. According to the NY Times, Florida and New York both have 35k cases cases per 100k population -- obviously there are substantial differences in data quality, but we are clearly not looking at an order-of-magnitude difference between these two massively different responses. Given that lens, the ultimate outcome of the pandemic is "almost everyone eventually gets covid." As a result, the vaccines -- in reducing mortality -- saved an absolutely immense amount of lives.