This is massively revisionist. "Shutting down overnight" was pretty much the response across the nation in March 2020. This was based on the information available at the time, and as things evolved, things changed.

Everything after was basically differences in how quickly things opened back up (and what things, in what order, with what restrictions).

And mass support for reopening rapidly with no restrictions wasn't there even in Florida or Texas early on - consider the sub-$60M box office that Tenet brought in. Theaters were open where allowed (hell, they were even open in Orange County in SoCal, not just in Florida), but nobody wanted to go because they were looking at the transmission and hospitalization data themselves and waiting for things to settle down and for vaccines to come out. Same with how conferences and events were being canceled before official government action in March 2020.

Economic damage was done at least as much, if not more, by individual behaviors as official policy. And can you blame people for that? Almost as many people died of Covid in the US before the vaccines as after the vaccines in 2021, despite there being way less of a return to normalcy by that point - imagine the number of deaths (and knock-on deaths from the overwhelmed health system) that would've happened if nobody had changed their behavior.

Claiming something like that you could've fixed homelessness in California - which was a rapidly growing problem pre-Covid - by never "officially" shutting down in March 2020 is ludicrous.