When you go up that chain you will eventually run into a very serious monetary crisis that would crash the banks, the real estate market, and the entire economy.
There are various degrees of being scathed. "Everyone gets scathed" is not an argument. Some did way, way better than others.
In a short pandemic world, it's likely that the European strategy will perform better, while in a long pandemic world, the US strategy may perform better.
I do agree with the OP though, it's far too early to tell (except letting the unemployment benefits lapse in the US was almost certainly a bad idea).
And again, I wouldn't call out a "winner" just yet. Those decisions will likely have vastly different impacts post-epidemic.
Can we, though? We are not even half time yet (most likely). How are we going to judge a government in the beginning of a pandemic as if the pandemic was already over? Maybe what looks like a poor strategy now will turn out to be the best later. Same true for the economic bailouts, some countries went harder than others, and it's not yet clear which will work better.
There are some anomalies that's difficult to explain (Sweden, for example). Sure, we can retrofit some model, and imagine we have it all figured out, but could you have predicted it correctly?
5 years from now when we look at the death certificates from nations with reliable death certificate records, we might have a better idea.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-09-21/sweden...
This would be the dumbest idea right now. I hope government agencies worldwide can resist the attack from media.
[Don't get me wrong, fuck banks, evil hedge funds, and speculative landlords, but they are barely going to be hit by something like this.]