Woah! Didn’t you recently reject the possibility of finding any value in listening to a doctor who’s a mere nurse educator instead of a medical doctor according to the licensing requirements of whatever jurisdiction you prefer? Obviously you need the right kind of expert, not just any expert.
And yet, the vast majority of medical doctors (and doctors of any sort) are not experts in disease control, also known as epidemiology.
Oh and look at that, some epidemiologists aren’t even medical doctors. I don’t study the minutiae of medical licensing and therefore get lost in these distinctions, but you seem to be even more lost than I am.
To be fair, not all experts in the control of the spread of viruses are epidemiologists. Some are occupational health and safety experts. (I reckon the vast majority of them are not medical doctors either.) Have you ever tried asking them what they think of vaccine and PPE mandates for workplaces? They’ll tell you (don’t take my word for it – go and ask them yourself) about something called the hierarchy of hazard controls.
Long story short, PPE is the least desirable method of control because it’s the least effective.
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Can the virus be eliminated? That’s what certain disinformation spreaders promised the world the vaccines and “vaccines” would do. They were obviously wrong. They even knew – if they were really paying attention – that they were wrong, as even the manufacturers didn’t officially make such claims.
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Can the virus be substituted? Not really. People who recently tested negative for covid can be substituted for people who tested positive as long as staffing levels permit (which is arguably really an administrative control as you don’t automatically know who’s positive and negative), but some politicians decided (relying on “expert” advice of course) that it was more important to be “vaccinated” than to be covid negative. You may recall memes about it such as this one.
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Can the virus be controlled through engineering? Short answer: yes. You can’t achieve perfect control this way (of course you can’t, as perfect control would be elimination), but you can reduce the likelihood of infection in indoor settings through improved ventilation. You can reduce it even further by going outdoors, though to qualify as an engineering (not administrative) control that would need to involve removing the roof and possibly the walls.
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Can the virus be controlled administratively? See above regarding substitution. You can also implement maximum exposure periods to symptomatic persons, testing, and tracing… oh and mandatory paid sick leave, but that might cause your libertarian tendency to spring magically back to life or something.
Administrative controls will never be perfect of course. They may be so imperfect that people refuse to take them seriously (see “pingdemic”). What many people ended up deciding was better than a pesky web of intersecting administrative controls that didn’t seem to work very well was one great shining administrative control in the form of a vaccine passport.
[insert golden calf meme] 
Then the passport system failed spectacularly, not because the masses rebelled against the Orwellianism of it but because it relied of course on the vaccines and “vaccines” that failed spectacularly at what they were initially perceived by the masses as being capable of (as promised by expert disinfo spreaders like Mr. Biden), compounded by changing ideas of what it meant to be “fully vaccinated”. The traditional concepts of one shot for life, one shot every ~10 years, even one shot every year were all thrown out. One shot every 6 months seemed to be catching on, despite talk of much shorter periods… but populations demonstrated themselves less and less willing to comply, probably because the twice yearly shots did not stop the spread of covid and didn’t even (in the long run) produce a strong popular perception of reducing the spread. You can bring up statistics from specific jurisdictions to quibble, and other will counter with statistics from other specific jurisdictions. The meta-studies were not impressive for the vax legs good side. The new meme of “I’m grateful for my vaccination because otherwise the symptoms would be worse” replaced the old meme of “if you get the vaccine you will not get covid”. Despite countless celebrity endorsements, the new meme just wasn’t good enough to keep the system together.
- Can the virus be controlled through PPE? Short answer: an extremely qualified yes. (For non-native speakers reading this, that’s “qualified” in the negative sense, i.e. limited.) There was a gold rush on gloves and sanitizer, like the earlier gold rush on toilet paper. These products can be useful, but there are serious limits to their usefulness, especially when dealing with an airborne virus. Same for masks, the vast majority of which do an extremely poor job of blocking airborne virus particles (despite their relative success at stopping droplets, exposure to which could be better controlled administratively though). Overall, proving money spent on PPE was money well spent would be like pushing a rock up a hill for eternity, unless you have a very low standard of “well”.
I hope what you get from this is that the kind of analysis that’s needed for sound public policy – or even sound corporate policy in a private enterprise – is much more complicated than just “what did the head of the WHO or CDC or whatever say today at a press conference?”