If nothing is done to stop it a virus will keep spreading until it runs out of new people to infect (herd immunity). For the now-dominant Delta variant that would require more than 80% of the population to gain immunity, either from previous infection or vaccination. Without effective vaccines an estimated fatality rate of around 0.5% would mean about 0.4% of the population could die (more than 30 million people worldwide).
The death rate can now be reduced significantly by vaccines, though you seem to doubt even that. However, vaccines weren't available until late 2020, and most of the world's population is still unvaccinated. If people had taken your view that there was no health emergency then obviously we would not have got these vaccines developed in record time.
Even with vaccines, deaths in a number of countries that did less well in controlling the virus have reached 0.2% of the population or more. In Sweden it is 0.14%, and it's not true that they did nothing. There were restrictions on some activities and they also relied on people following the guidelines. Most Swedes are probably more sensible than you seem to be. In any case, the Swedish economy seems to have done even worse than it's neighbours, so it's not clear what benefit they got from accepting a higher death rate.
https://news.yahoo.com/half-sweden-d...115500722.html
