Well, got to remember, when there were far fewer cases, tests were still in prototype phase, not widely available, and in some cases unreliable (I think a lot of the Japanese cruise passengers that got the WHO test tested negative, then later came down with it after being released).

Yeah, but we could have done more. There was a lot of supply chain issues the government just ignored. I remember in early 2020 when masks were unavailable a couple domestic mas manufacturers were saying they weren't comfortable producing more. They could scale up production, but they didn't want to deal with suddenly firing people when things went back to normal.

Japan cruise case was in February 2020 which is about a year ago now. Testing became more reliable a long time ago.

Didn't I just say testing wasn't reliable then, because it was very new? So it wasn't a long time ago. Reliable tests weren't available en masse until maybe summer, and even then not in all countries/areas.

India made tests mandatory to skip institutional quarantine on August 8th i.e. more than 5 months ago. That is sounds like a long time ago to me compared to when US has decided to make this a requirement.

We were also trying to test existing populations in busy city centers and concerned about not having enough tests.