Hmm, you say that, but that's what China, Australia, and a lot of other Asia-Pacific nations did. They aren't exactly in better economical shape now.

Are there any countries that don't have any COVID restrictions other than international travel? Did every country in the world fumble it?

I think New Zealand is rather famous for it's COVID response and recovery. Denmark and Finland also had great responses.

That said, I'm in the US and not well equipped to speak to their responses, having not experienced them first hand.

Finland’s was quite light touch, apart from the start where bars had to shut along with schools and WFH, ‘lockdown’ here was not in the same league as say the UK or France. There never were and are not now enforceable mask mandates and the more empty parts of the country have been restriction free for most of the year.

Maybe it was luck, a sparse population or of course the often repeated ‘everyone always does what they’re told’ (hmmm). Also it started off well but things have become quite fragmented recently (different agencies issuing rules about different things at different times, in different regions, much to the dismay of anyone trying to plan anything). In short, whilst interesting, there’s not really any useful comparison that you can make between the US and Finland in my opinion.

Both New Zealand and Finland have very low population density. UK and France have 10 times more people per square mile.

The density people live at isn't "very low", they mostly live in towns and cities.

Objectively the population density of Helsinki [1] is half that of London [2] - and according to google, a tenth of that of Paris.

Subjectively after living in both Helsinki and London it feels like Helsinki is even less crowded. I would say that there are fewer people who commute in to commercial areas from outside of the city than in London, and the commercial areas such as offices are generally a lot less dense, newer, and more spread out.

[1] https://www.hel.fi/hel2/tietokeskus/julkaisut/pdf/19_06_14_H... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

Yeah, it's still not 'very low'. The population density of the town I live in, which is not 'very low', is ~400 per square km. The county, which is denser than most of the area of the US, is 12 per square km.

After initial severe restrictions, yes. No.

Which countries are those?

New Zealand is an example. Auckland has an outbreak right now and has relatively severe restrictions again, but the rest of the country has very few restrictions beyond mask use. My life would have been impacted far less had I been in Auckland instead of a big city in the US.

You made my point for me. Even New Zealand, the one country everyone likes to point to as having beat COVID, has lockdowns today.

Sure and in my opinion it’s a better system for me personally and if I had an in-person business my balance sheet would prefer it too. All to obscure an incredibly important point that their death toll has been minimal, under 50 as far as I can see. USA is nearing 700,000.

Which Pandemic got resolved in span of 18 months, I would like to know. The medieval ones took decades to burn through the planet and the spanish flu took 50 million+ and last more than 2 years.

Systems built without taking the Pandemic risk into account are the issue here, Pandemic itself we know it was coming.. we also have movies about them.

I hear the government hasn't done any planning for Ghostbusting which is disappointing given they have had almost 40 years to plan for it.

We also had pandemic plans that got completely tossed out the window. Interestingly if you read them most say to not do any of what we did, including masks.

Also, what pandemics had multiple vaccines delivered in record time? Ones that worked better than was ever hoped for. Even with that, which was the end goal, society seems unable to move on.

> at least I damn well hope the next one isn't so badly managed

It will be, and that not being obvious is exactly the problem we have today with our policies.

The pandemic is a worldwide phenomenon, to think it could have gone any other way is incredibly naive.

To say the pandemic was extended by politics around safety measures is missing several larger reasons covid became endemic.

e.g. local politics is largely irrelevant when the us never instituted forced quarantine for international travel.

The pandemic was definitely extended in the US due to politics.

Every attempt at curtailing the spread was rolled back or defeated specifically due to politics at the highest levels of the US Gov't, from not implementing travel bans as appropriate to blocking masking mandates, to state level gov'ts re-opening economies and lifting lockdowns during surges. The current hot-spots in the US are almost perfectly aligned on US political boundaries.

Even now it continues as masking and vaccination continues to be politicized with one side spreading obviously unfounded FUD around the vaccine and inflammatory messaging that masking children is "child abuse".

The pandemic is still going on in plenty of countries other than the US.

Trying to blame a global phenomenon on the politics of one country with less than 5% of the world’s population is extremely parochial.

Being ‘extended’ 1) assumes we know when it will be over (we don’t yet!), and 2) we can calculate when/if we are through it, and when/if we would have been through it.

It would have required massive, and likely unsuccessful mobilization to lock down travel (both foreign and domestic) enough to actually control Covid aka New Zealand. Considering the land borders and smuggling problems there alone, I think it would have been ultimately futile.

Considering how politically fragmented the country was and still is even before the pandemic, trying it somewhat successfully may also have kicked off a Civil war - not that anyone would have tried that hard.

Vaccination rollouts could definitely have gone smoother, and better programs to manage the rollouts would have also been really nice - but given the situation above, it would only have been a (short) while before Delta or something like it got going anyway and started spreading.

Fewer would have died from COVID probably, but overall deaths may have been similar (more violence during riots? More shooting and civil unrest), and the fear and other issues (socio political strife for instance) would still have happened, just looked different probably. These types of situations are brutally hard.

Overall, I’d give the US a solid ‘C’ grade. Not great, not terrible.