It certainly has been interesting. Last I heard, the worst country in Europe in terms of deaths per capita was the Czech Republic, which was also the country everyone pointed to earlier in the pandemic as the European success story which all the other countries in Europe should imitate and which showed they'd all failed miserably at dealing with Covid.

I am Czech but I’ve been living in Sweden for the past 6 or so years. The biggest difference I see is consistency and trust between population and the agencies and government.

Sweden did this: - we now have to do XYZ, this is the new normal. The things we ask you to do are designed to be sustainable in the long term (the fact they didn’t close schools is a perfect example. Closing schools is absolutely not sustainable long term)

Cz did this: - cases are up, close everything - when cases are down, open up everything. Chest beating ensued as you wrote. We won, why should we help Italians who didn’t manage as well as we did etc.. - when cases are up close everything - repeat with confusing variations on what is allowed or banned this time

This eroded the (already weak) trust between people and the government IMO and nobody gives a shit about following even the regulations that make sense. Listening to my family describing what is going on in CZ gives a very Kafkaesque feeling.

"It will impact country X but not us" has been a consistent pattern in this pandemic, and it does not make me optimistic going forward.

I'd argue that the countries that did face SARS have handled SARS-Cov-2 better than the ones that didn't.

Underrated comment. NZ, AUS, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea. Most of the countries doing well have dealt with bird flu, SARS, etc in the recent past. Shouldn't surprise people they reacted quickly and got it under control. They had plenty of practice.