India or Brazil would seem to be the obvious counterfactuals. Unfortunately, their officially reported death rates probably can't be trusted so the best we can do is look at excess deaths, and in India, as an example, it's... pretty ugly:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/20/1018438...
That's closer to 3 deaths per thousand, or 50% higher than your estimate.
Putting that in context, assuming 8 deaths per thousand as a baseline, that number going to 11 per thousand is a 40% increase in excess deaths.
And that's ignoring that those deaths will be concentrated in specific cohorts (the elderly, the vulnerable, people in high risk jobs, etc) who don't have the luxury of working from a cozy home office.
> The point of the story was that (for Statisticsville, at least) the people were so busy fighting amongst themselves about what actions to take (or not) about an infectious disease that they didn't realize the deadly side effects of that social discord until it was too late.
This is, unfortunately, a unique problem of the US. While there's certainly been plenty of social discord in other countries as a consequence of Covid policies, they've been nowhere near the level of what's seen in the US.
The solution isn't to compromise public health policy so as to avoid touching off a partisan foodfight. The solution is to address the root problem that has lead to such severe social discord; to heal those fissures that have opened up in US society that have lead to every single issue being politicized and thus polarized to the detriment of the entire population.