To go right back to the beginning, this was Plato’s argument in the Republic (benevolent philosopher king better than mob rule). He argued that democracy would tend to mob rule (some good examples of that recently...) but history has also shown that there are very few philosopher kings/very hard to maintain that for more than a generation

> Or will democracy require something akin to "martial law" to quickly decide and act on urgent matters?

After the pandemic hit the West - Europe started locking down mid-March, Trump banned EU flights on 12th - Germany (a democracy of 80 million people) passed a financial aid package on 23rd of March; US (a democracy of 300 million people) followed on the 25th.

So it's quite clear that democracies can react quickly, provided there's broad consensus of what the problem is and how to solve it; of course, things slow down when there's no consensus and conflicting views, but arguably that's a feature, not a bug.

If anything I think the pandemic shows that the 'free West' sucks at responding to such threats. We've done miserably compared to Singapore, China and Vietnam.

It's mixed. There are a (admittedly small) number of countries in the 'free West' that have had 0 or even negative excess mortality so far.

It's also difficult to compare because autocracies are less likely to release data that makes them look bad (they're too busy building a 'strong collective identity').

Personally I'm incredibly happy to have spent the pandemic in Europe rather than totalitarian regimes. And even though I spent my time between Italy, UK and Slovenia, three of the worst-hit countries.

But obviously different people have different preferences. I'm also young, fit, healthy programmer, so all-in-all very lucky.

I'm a bit older, was pretty fit & healthy and also a programmer. That didn't matter much to the virus though and I can recommend skipping this one.

That's true even if you leave the US out ?

US has a lower death rate than the UK, Italy, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, and several other European states.