I think it's hilarious that everyone who commented on this completely ignored your given examples of Florida and New Jersey, and instead chose to compare Florida to completely different places, that just-so happen to make Florida look bad.
Regardless of strategy, every country in the northern hemisphere that had a decent number of cases in spring 2020, got absolutely hammered in winter 2020.
Of course there are examples of regions where the one with more restrictions got a better result than the one with less. But there are simply way too many counter-examples where regions that did more, tried more, had more restrictions, still got a similar or worse outcome than comparable regions that didn't.
Here's a pretty fun quiz that highlights this complete lack of correlations in the actual data: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
Regardless of strategy, every country in the northern hemisphere that had a decent number of cases in spring 2020, got absolutely hammered in winter 2020.
Of course there are examples of regions where the one with more restrictions got a better result than the one with less. But there are simply way too many counter-examples where regions that did more, tried more, had more restrictions, still got a similar or worse outcome than comparable regions that didn't.
Here's a pretty fun quiz that highlights this complete lack of correlations in the actual data: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/