The biggest fuckup last time was people's general confusion and lack of preparation.
Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around.
What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).
The biggest fuckup last time was relying on the general public to voluntarily do the right thing. It felt like we were in a leaky boat at sea with half the population trying to plug the leaks as fast as they can while the other half were deliberately drilling more holes.
I'm not sure what country you're in, but my country's government (USA) did next to nothing besides issuing hollow advisories. Just a bunch of talk about "please wear a mask" and "pretty please stay at home" and "pretty please with sugar on top, don't go around coughing on each other." But there was almost no enforcement, especially in smaller towns. The only thing pretty consistently enforced was school closures, which obviously wasn't enough.
The USA is a federation, so the laws aren’t the same everywhere. Where I live (NYC) it was absolutely nothing like you describe.
Restaurants and bars were closed until Feb. 2021 (with a brief reprieve in fall 2020) and heavily restricted (capacity restrictions, curfews) for months longer.
Schools were mostly shut down with some brief windows of reopening until Sept. 2021. Yes 2021, so 18 months. Masks were still required in schools for several months longer.
Masks were required on the subway until Sept. 2022. Yes 2022, so 30 months.
So adults were living under severe restrictions for nearly a year, and kids in public school for a year and a half. We were living under some form of restrictions for two and a half years.
Clear, correct, and unbiased information is what is needed. The CDC failed when they said it wasn’t airborne despite the evidence, they failed when they said masks were not needed initially, because they were afraid of panic buying.
The FDA screwed the pooch with testing. Many institutions could do tests, but the FDA wanted to maintain control and there process was flawed.
Operation Warp speed got a vaccine, but it went from Sterilizing vaccine, to lessen symptoms and hospitalization.
They failed to explain the difference between vaccine side effects and disease effects. Myocarditis? Could be a side effect of either. Perhaps they should have developed a test to determine which?
They let an idiot spout nonsense on TV and no one on stage correct him or clarified, letting the issue become political.
And have they really clarified what we are dealing with. A supposed respiratory virus that causes, myocarditis, neurological issues, stroke , blood clots , and multiple organ failures - is that really a respiratory virus.
Then we’ve declared victory too soon. And everything has left a bad taste in our mouths, such that no one will accept a lockdown again unless the disease has a 20% mortality rate. Ebola could break out and some people would compare the bleeding to lots of paper cuts.
You’re right of course, but despite these many failures, our public health institutions are still more trustworthy and reliable than Cletus the high school dropout and Cathy the essential oils lady, whose cohort are back in charge for another four years. We are not going to get clear, correct information out of these guys.
It's interesting how in every "scientist wins and saves the day" movie or book, there's a neat deus ex machina that conveniently removes ignorant politicians from overriding them.
... in reality, ignorant politicians will override them, more often than not.
Let us not forget the success of Sweden's approach.
With a more broadly lethal virus, they would have fared badly, but with what happened, it appears correct.
"...the Danish and Norwegian agencies were opposed to closing borders and schools, but political considerations trumped their concerns. Even in Britain, where the popular perception is that the government eventually agreed to a lockdown because scientific advisers called for it, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s powerful political adviser Dominic Cummings pressed the government’s independent scientific advisers to recommend faster and broader lockdown measures."
We should also not forget that the public messaging is important.
"Polls in March and April 2020 showed that more than 70 percent of Swedes trusted the public health agency and in January 2022, 68 percent did."
"By early July 2020, Sweden had not suffered the 82,000 deaths that the models had assumed, but 5,455—less than 7 percent of what was predicted."
On the other hand:
"By July 1, 2020, Sweden had experienced 517 COVID-19 deaths per million people, which was lower than Italy and Spain but as much as 5 to 10 times higher than its geographically and culturally closest neighbors, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. This made Sweden’s approach to COVID-19 look like a fiasco."
However:
"Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland."
"After all was said and done, astonishingly, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries, and less than half that of the United States."
"The world economy was 2.9 percent smaller after 2021 than it would have been according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecast before the pandemic; the Eurozone 2.1 was percent smaller, and the U.S. economy 1.2 percent smaller. The Swedish economy was 0.4 percent bigger. This is even more exceptional since the Swedish government introduced much less fiscal stimulus than most other countries."
More importantly, general vaccine hesitance was averted:
"In 2020 the Swedish childhood vaccination rate was 97.2—up by a tenth of a percentage point from the year before."
"Sweden’s alternative model was to rely more on recommendations, have faith in voluntary adaptations to the pandemic, and try to keep as much of society up and running as possible. Based on what we now know, this laissez faire approach seems to have paid off."
It's an interesting confluence of choices and outcomes to be sure. A few points to add:
- Poverty (economic shrinkage) also causes excess deaths
- Herd immunity for a moderately lethal virus is very much a thing
The issue at the beginning of the pandemic was... nobody knew how lethal COVID-19 was at population scale (or how lethal it might become).
If it was less-lethal and wouldn't become more lethal, the winning move was to minimize restrictions, keep the economy humming, and be okay with many people getting infected quickly.
If it was more-lethal or became more lethal, the above would leave a country fucked, with absolutely no way of reversing course short of a China style "everything stops" lockdown. Which would cause major economic pain and excess mortality as a consequence of that.
So gambling with an entire country's population... which choice do you make? Impossible call to be "right" about.
Given that we're only ~4 years post-pandemic, I daresay that part would go a lot better this time around.
What would probably be screwed up again would be flushing the monetary system with too much cheap money in an attempt to avoid recession, at the same time as supply is constrained, exacerbating inflation (especially in assets).