Yes, many person years were lost, mostly among the elderly and infirm. I am truly sorry for your loss, whether your father was in that group or not. But the fact on the ground is that "do nothing" and "do something stupid" were the only two choices that actually happened around the world, and regrettably mostly the latter. Pretending otherwise is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.
There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.
In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.
Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.