I’m pretty proud of our overall response as a nation, apart for the anti-mask loonies. Most of us did what was asked, and as a national policy we (mostly) followed the medical and scientific advice, with obvious compromises for economic, educational and social factors. And here we are now, having mostly gotten through it without massive loss of life, without overloading the hospitals (apart from unvaccinated towards the end) and we’re removing the restrictions.
Feels good.
Success should be measured by death tolls, happiness, and economic prosperity.
An increase in per capita infections feels like a pretty solid negative indicator of success. Happiness during this whole ordeal is often directly related to faith in science and willingness to make hard choices to ultimately strive for a reduction in infections. People who make hard choices to protect others aren't doing it to be happy, they're doing it to be right. Maybe you could convince me to agree to economics as indicator but not an immediate one. The results of our choices will take years to fully manifest and understand and the if you want to look at it in th immediate term, the US markets just took a dive and that will have global impact.
So... success?
Infections alone are meaningless. The only reason to even think about them is they impact other parts of daily life. If infections are 100x higher, but everyone is healthy and happy, who cares.
To the extent we should care, it is because they have impacts on other aspects of our life.
If a country is healthy, happy, and prosperous, their policy was a success, even if infections are high.
Alternatively, if a country is swamped with deaths, miserable, and economically failing, it doesn't matter if their infection numbers are low and they had the harshest lock downs.
Curfew, masks while standing up and not when sitting down, cloth masks which data shows do nothing (from Bangladeshi RCT), etc.