I think you misunderstand what people are doing. There is no attempt to present those items as comprehensive, but rather just to make it clear which specific item a response is directed to.
Yet, of course, we know that's not actually true. For example, see the new reported deaths by day graphs for NY and Florida, here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
The timing was different, but the shapes of waves were different, too. NY's first wave was extremely steep and short. It went from a 1-death-per-day average in mid-March to a peak of 974 per day by mid-April, then an uninterrupted almost vertical drop back under 100 in a month and a half. Florida's first surge cracked 1 per day in late March, then rose for a bit through early May, then fell just slightly through mid-June, then rose again to a peak in early August, then fell to about half that level, then pretty much plateaued for a month, then fell again. The shapes are wildly different.
I reject the characterization as draconian. Some of the responses we're talking about were things like mask mandates and vaccine mandates, neither of which are draconian. But, yes, the policies weren't effective in reducing the deaths to zero. In the same sense, seatbelts don't reduce traffic fatality numbers to zero, but that doesn't mean that the "draconian" step of buckling up is a bad idea. It's a matter of comparing the cost of the measure to the benefit.
What we're actually doing is comparing different policy responses to a once-per-century disease threat. Some of those responses preserved a lot of lives relative to others. The differences are gigantic. For example, in the last year, it's as if "Red America" were suffering ten 9/11-magnitude terrorist attacks per month, in terms of how much their mortality is elevated relative to that of "Blue America."
Yes, and one thing it did is killed people at much higher rates in areas that took a more laissez-faire approach to protecting residents. To your point, it's true that, as always with social science, causation is going to be impossible to show definitively. We cannot run the pandemic a hundred times while changing various variables in isolation to see what happens. Instead, we're stuck inferring things from correlations, from our one and only history with it. But what those correlations show is a statistically meaningful tendency for more politically conservative areas to have suffered higher mortality rates during the pandemic.... which, of course, is exactly what we'd expect to see based on their tendency to be less likely to follow expert advice. The experts, for example, warned that lower vaccination rates would mean higher mortality rates. All the data confirms that lower vaccination rates correlate with higher mortality rates. None of this is a surprise, even if it's emotionally uncomfortable for conservatives.
Well, those were certainly huge issues during the period of the pandemic when the orange moron was in charge. But in 2021, we had a falling federal deficit and the best GDP growth in almost four decades, so we know it's possible to address those things even while working to rein in COVID. In fact, those policy measures to protect people from COVID are part of why 2021 looked so much better than 2020. For example, why were we losing jobs in December 2020 but gaining them rapidly in December 2021? A big part of the reason is that by December 2021 a huge portion of the population had been fully vaccinated, making it so people were able to engage more, economically, without taking on unreasonable health risks.
Fortunately, government made a lot of money available to small businesses to see them through the pandemic, which is part of why our economy was able to bounce back so strongly in 2021 --most of those businesses were standing by and ready to ramp back up, rather than the economy taking years to recover as new firms had to be formed to fill the niches emptied by mass bankruptcies.
Absolutely. Back when the idiot was running the show, our response was terrible and we suffered devastating loss of life, as well as the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Fortunately, the Biden era's been a big improvement.