I'm constantly trying to find a solution that would work best and would provide the least damage. Time is our enemy as of now though, so any solution must be applied immediately or the situation could get even worse.
As far as I'm concerned, any strategy has an unavoidable sacrifice. Be it lives, economy or something else, there is a sacrifice to be made.
The problem is actually the slowness of the system (we can exclude China here), as we can see from the EU example, where the issue of border closure has been discussed for a month, and in the same time tens of thousands of people move from one country to another transmitting a virus with almost no control.
Italy made a cardinal mistake by allowing the virus to spread to hospitals and clinics, infecting doctors and medical staff first, and then infecting all patients, most of them elderly. The system simply burst, people dying in the corridors of hospitals because there are not enough rooms and respirators. Other EU countries have fortunately responded in a much better way, closing borders and introducing quarantine for the whole country, so hopefully the Italian scenario will not happen again.
Main problem in combating the pandemic is insufficient testing, to what the WHO chief also warned saying "You can not extinguish fire with blindfold on eyes", and many countries are doing just that. The main reason is that the panic level is kept as low as possible and that the economy suffers as little damage as possible. But unfortunately it cannot produce results, which has made many countries actually change their procedures completely, but definitely too late.
For now, the only option is to enforce strict quarantines, test as many people as possible, and limit population movement to at least 30 days. If the world were united in such measures, we could achieve very good results. Vaccine is something we absolutely need, but although hundreds of labs around the world are working on it, everyone says it won't be realistic for at least another 5 months.