Think back to early 2020. A lot of the serious deaths/damage were not due to covid per se, but due to (1) covid being so novel we didn't know how to treat it very well, eg using ventilators in cases that could have just used O2 tanks (2) covid spreading so fast that it was effectively a denial of service attack against the local hospitals.

Both of these factors were improvable even by small measures that don't prevent infection but just reduce the severity or probability, slowing down ("flattening the curve") the pandemic and postponing more of the cases till later when there was more capacity as well as better treatment knowledge.

As someone who suffered a lot in 2021 due to an illness that was totally unrelated to covid, but that was only so bad because of insufficient medical care available due to the pandemic (literally, some simple better care and tests earlier on would have definitely caught and resolved it, but getting care during the pandemic was a shitshow), I take this aspect quite seriously. I think covid was best understood as a crisis for the medical system than for individuals (relatively speaking)

EDIT: fwiw I'm not even disagreeing with you on anything (yes, on HN, I know), just riffing :)