In the ongoing struggle to write the history of the pandemic years, nothing is more important than mortality — did the world’s governments save us from mass mortality or not?
The grand strategy (which as I have said before was neither grand nor strategic) was to lock down the population of whole countries as an interim measure “until a vaccine becomes available.”
This was a novel (and completely unproven) strategy to defeat a supposedly completely novel virus, on the grounds that no human had ever encountered anything like SARS-CoV-2 before so no one would have any preexisting immunity to it.
But the clue is in the name — SARS-CoV-2 was named after SARS to which it was closely related, sharing approximately 79% of its genome sequence according to this paper in Nature.