@Finkelstein: We've seen nations that both had full shutdowns and left the country open. Even within the US we've seen both. Florida remained open while NY locked down tight, NY is worse off than Florida in every measure. Sweden is better off in every measure.
It's almost as if poor policies and ideologies that were in place prior to the pandemic mattered more than the policies the government enacted after it began. We haven't seen the full analysis yet, but people with private health care choices did orders of magnitude better than those that relied on government health care options in the US, a lot of people lost those options with ObamaCare.
The reason so many died in NY is because Medicare/Medicaid/ObamaCare policies forced old people and homeless back into nursing homes and shelters to reduce costs for empty and financially failing state hospitals which Cuomo effectively turned into a political tool to blame others. Even in the midst of the pandemic, Cuomo made very clear that taking in money for his state was more important when he said volunteer health care workers would have to pay income taxes to NYS.
Florida on the other hand committed funds to hospitals so people with COVID-19 could stay longer in the hospital. Cuomo still hasn't copied those policies, I'm working in a currently financially defunct system myself within NY, we got more from Trump ($200M from the Federal Government) than NYS ($30M).