I don't think it's prudent to be overly critical of how any population behaved during a novel pandemic, aside from pretending it didn't exist.
Just as people play the lottery, despite the odds, they hope to be the exception. This was a reverse lottery, we eventually learned, that 99.9% of people 'won' instead of 0.1%. But when it's not $1.00 but your health or your life at risk, yeah, you're going to be fearful of losing and getting put on a ventilator.
As in my previous post of the made-up example of 5,000 dead kids being statistically acceptable, but still horrific, how many dead teachers would have been acceptable? And as a teacher and not knowing the full scope of the virus, I was not at all afraid for my health/life, but if I thought I could possibly carry it, spread it to a student, and have that taken home to endanger an elderly family member, I was not okay with that.
Once we knew the sick and elderly were the ones really at-risk, worry for myself decreased to align with the low risk. We knew kids weren't, by and large, getting sick from it. But we didn't know rates of how contagious it was. The data wasn't there to know, and you can't just guesstimate this shit with people's lives.
When there's a novel pandemic virus, yes, you should be cautious. That's just plainly true. When you have data and think you know something, great, that's progress, but making sure you know what you think you know is good, too.
Looking back and saying "we were too cautious" is a good thing. It's a helluva lot better than the alternative.