The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.

("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)

The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.

Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.

In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.

The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.

But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.

It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.