In the US, 1.8% of cases have resulted in deaths, with 10% of Americans getting sick and tested[0]. The majority of these deaths happening 6 months into the pandemic, i.e. a lot of knowledge had been gained and resources stockpiled.
Doing nothing early in the pandemic would likely have increased the death rate to roughly 3% because of a lack of medial resources (including doctors and nurses), and resulting in 66% of Americans getting sick. Excluding children (i.e. 300 MM US adults) the expected death count would have been 6 MM people.
That said, I feel you, I would have personally hoped that for the effort we did put into "whatever we did", it would have reduced deaths by 100x (i.e. less than 0.06 MM deaths) but sadly we didn't work as a team and people died for it.
However, while it shouldn't even have been 0.6 MM, "whatever we did" roughly decreased the deaths by 10x and thats a worth calling out.
[0] As of May 5th 2021, 32,513,303 cases and 578,500 deaths. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/8167071...