I am currently living in Portugal, and was in Spain for the last 12 months. Mask use in Portugal is 100% on a day to day basis unless doing sport, Spain was the same where I was.

During the summer we did an outdoor road trip through 5 countries. There were no mandates for wearing it outside, but I didn't see a single person not wearing one inside in Italy, Austria, Slovenia, France...

The initial U.S. response to the virus was to do nothing. It will go away soon. We can blame it on China for not communicating it sooner, but what would we have done? Things would be better if we had done nothing, sooner?

Doing nothing? There was a rapid mobilization of emergency military hospitals (that were not used at all), ventilator development, vaccine development, therapeutic development, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and so on. And, here we are with multiple vaccines being deployed in record time.

Also, China could have locked down travel from China that might have helped.

> China could have locked down travel from China that might have helped.

See [1] and [2] for fact checks on this point.

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...

[2] https://danielabell.com/?s=Ferguson&submit=Search

>how unfortunate this virus was allowed to spread so long before the world was told about it.

Blame China. I'm frankly shocked at how few international repercussions they've gotten. Any sane rational nation would be issuing economic sanctions left and right for their inept, pathetic handling of the pandemic.

If by "inept, pathetic handling of the pandemic" you mean the cover-up or data fudging accusations, I highly recommend the four part series in Quillette that examines the merit of these charges:

https://quillette.com/category/covid-19/china-syndrome-serie...

Here's the Twitter thread where the author introduced the series and gave some helpful backgrounds:

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1298053847844368386

As he says:

"Again, I know that many of you are skeptical, but this essay has required a ridiculous amount of work and I'm really confident about the conclusions I reach, so I hope you will read it with an open-mind. I will post the other parts in this thread as they are published."

The author also has very helpful comments on the recent CNN leak

https://mobile.twitter.com/phl43/status/1333563577324761091

I remember when Trump issued travel restrictions on China, only to be scolded for being xenophobic.