As others have said, our spring lockdown was only a partial lockdown. It was actually pretty successful in the northeast, but then other parts of the country re-opened too soon in April (GA, FL and TX notably). Remember the "Liberate Michigan!" tweets?

That early reopening was one of the biggest mistakes we made as a country, along with not shutting air travel down in February, or at least insisting on strict quarantine measures for any international arrivals.

You're right though, we are not going to go into another strict lockdown. American's don't have the stomach for it. But there is another way. We could all have at home rapid antigen test kits, and the R0 would fall by 80% if we all tested ourselves twice a week. I'm still at a loss why we don't. Speak to many college students and they'll tell you how they're being tested twice a week. Why not all of us?
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"When it came to curbing spread, they found that frequency and turnaround time are much more important than test sensitivity.
For instance, in one scenario in a large city, widespread twice-weekly testing with a rapid but less sensitive test reduced the degree of infectiousness, or R0 (“R naught”), of the virus by 80%. But twice-weekly testing with a more sensitive PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, which takes up to 48 hours to return results, reduced infectiousness by only 58%. In other scenarios, when the amount of testing was the same, the rapid test always reduced infectiousness better than the slower, more sensitive PCR test.
That’s because about two-thirds of infected people have no symptoms and as they await their results, they continue to spread the virus."

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/...9-tide-within-weeks/