I wonder if another interpretation might be that culture matters regardless what policies get enforced. I hear that people in Sweden stayed at home more and distanced themselves regardless of enforcement. Similarly asian countries likely already had higher acceptance of mask wearing regardless of what was enforced and so on.

The praising of swedish policies seems to largely come from folks in the US wear we have no social/cultural consensuses because the country is so divided

You're still making an assumption that those culture matters have an effect. For pretty much any country (or smaller region) it's easy to construct an after the fact rationalization of the outcomes.

Asia did better because people accept mask wearing--true but it's still pretty minimal in normal times. But somehow lack of mask wearing probably didn't matter in Sweden--but that's because they hate getting anywhere near another person anyway. But in the US Trump supporters not wearing masks is a big problem. Etc.

I'm not going to argue that nothing matters. (Certainly protecting especially vulnerable populations is something a lot of places totally whiffed on early.) But I expect that some things people are really polarized about don't matter much.

Our efforts (and by "our" I mean "the human species'") were absolutely unfocused. If we had spent the same amount of effort on getting the most vulnerable (mostly, the elderly) well away from the urban areas, we could have done a lot more good.

In very few places people in EU wear a mask in overall and public Healthcare experts say it's ineffective for general population.

You cannot trust a damn word coming out of Belarus, or almost anywhere in ex-USSR. You can safely assume that death rate in Belarus is 2x-3x of reported.

Well Belarus' government has its issues, for sure. But I notice that the (very real) issues of reporting, only get noticed when they point the "wrong" way (whatever that is for the person speaking). When Japan had fewer cases than South Korea, the widespread explanation was that Japan must have bunk data. Similarly when China's cases dropped.

I don't claim that Belarus, China, or even Japan have perfect data. But they are not North Korea, and if they had widespread devastation their neighbors would be able to tell. I don't think Belarus' data is particularly less trustworthy than Russia's. Both were willing to report cases going steeply up, when it was true.

Really? How do you know what is "wrong" way for me? In any case, Russian excess death is 3x of the official COVID numbers; it is a relatively well known fact, you can google Alexey Raksha, a demograph from the RosStat; he has a great explanation how Russian and the other ex-USSR numbers are made. You actually do not even need to listen to someone else, go and check RossStat numbers by yourself, they almost certainly are in open access.