China dealt with the pandemic swiftly and decisively and life is getting back to normal there now. Meanwhile, the West had months of warning and vast majority of the governments chose to do nothing. Instead of stocking up on supplies and preparing the public the officials and the media called Chinese lockdowns authoritarian and played down the severity of the problem until thousands of people started dying. Our governments chose to protect business interests and to sacrifice the public for the sake of the profits.
The pandemic is just a small preview of what we can expect to happen with climate change in the coming decade.
This is sometimes done on purpose:
> The Overton Window is an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. Politicians can only act within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton Window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones within the window, seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable.