Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are. Even for established diseases and measures, like closing schools during a flu pandemic, the evidence is vague and contradictory.

Coming to conclusions about how good countries' pandemic planning is based on how well they've done is even less meaningful, because it doesn't even attempt to deal with confounding factors or simple luck. It's certainly very suspicious that so many Covid-19 success stories were in the same geographic Asia-Pacific area, despite having very different cultures, policies and measures.

> Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are.

Before an actual pandemic, that may be somewhat true. although some measures are blatantly counterproductive, e.g https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/13/boris-johnso...

An actual disaster though, is a "can't fake it" test of disaster preparedness.

So you agree with what I said here prior evaluations were overtaken by events? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27290252