Sure, but some places did handle it very well nonetheless.
With testing and tracing systems, early quarantines and lockdowns, and…masks.
possibly off-topic rant…
The masks thing was the biggest mess this time around. In most East Asian countries people preemptively wore masks and got off pretty lightly.
In the West, the initial shortage of masks and the need to reserve them for healthcare workers led to medical experts cautioning that regular civilians did not need to wear masks. Fair enough.
But somehow this got mis-translated in the popular media and culture as “masks are useless” with several articles pointing and laughing at the ignorance of Asian people believing that masks could stop viruses.
This meant it was that much harder to get people to wear masks once the supply was there.
And sadly now it seems it’s been politicized forever. e.g. Even many left-leaning news sites say that wearing a mask in a situation where it is not absolutely legally required is “virtue signalling”.
So anyway the main problem has been attitudes, not the virus symptoms.
Welll… this is valid inasmuch as a certain segment of Americans have the attitude “nobody’s going to tell me to do something inconvenient.” But it’s very true to say that the symptom profile of this disease seems ideally suited to inflaming that sort of attitude.
If I wanted to destroy a society without killing all the people, I’d design a disease just like COVID. Stoke an enormous social division by attacking the poor and medically marginal people, while (mostly) sparing the young and wealthy. Create a disease that doesn’t directly harm most of the workforce, but imposes enormous work-conflicting family care burdens upon them. The most-affected people have cause to be outraged over what’s happening to them, the stubborn, selfish part of society has incentive to dig in their heels and refuse to cede even an inch of privilege, and demand that the other lazy pricks stop whining and get back to their (suddenly essential) jobs, paying the same garbage wage as before.
That’s what we saw with COVID. Early on, the public face of COVID was doctors working 18 hour days until their faces were creased by PPE. The recalcitrant deniers coded them as wealthy virtuous elites, whom they actively resent, while the victims remained mostly invisible, ensconced in quarantined wards dying on ventilators.
Had the early social signs of COVID been dead children stacked up like cordwood in funeral pyres in Seattle and NYC, things would have been different. Perhaps different in a good way (social virtue around public health is a good thing, let’s wear masks), perhaps different in a bad way (permanent martial law under Field Marshal Trump, for the children). But undeniably there would have been a difference.
