My social distancing, working from home, and mask wearing started earlier than anyone else I know due to my doctor's concern for my history of allergies, lung infections, and proximity to Austin's patient zero, and I listened to him. My 70 year old asthmatic stepmother got it and claims it wasn't pleasant but "pretty much the flu" and got through it with Vick's vapor rub, tequila, and sweating it out with backyard gardening, but I know people considerably younger and in better health that died, in some cases quite suddenly. The US doesn't particularly stand out vs Western Europe, but the spread among those countries for case-fatality and deaths per100k is pretty wide, and it doesn't seem to correlate with rule enforcement. Countries like Spain and Belgium were way stricter than the US in lockdown regulation and enforcement, have better public health systems, and fared worse. Some were more lax and fared better. Israel's numbers are extremely low but everyone I knew there said the government had soldiers guarding grocery and drug stores armed with thermometers and cops arresting anyone going anywhere else. I'm sure there's a lot of discrepancy in how the data were collected, as well as age of population, obesity, and so on that could account for it, but I suspect that has more to do with the willingness of the population to comply than anything else. Where the US (and UK) lag the most compared to most is in public approval which yet again seems to be independent of actual results. Countries in worse shape have far higher approval for their leaders. That's perception, and that's likely more to do with a hyper-partisan public and the adversarial relationship between political leadership and media than anything else. Disdain for the "new normal" has been near-universal in Western countries, and it has also been mischaracterized by media (especially in the US and the UK) as an expression of "extremism." Japan and other East Asian countries had almost no mandatory rules but people followed plague protocol (and had way lower infection rates than Western countries) without needing to be threatened. That doesn't work as well in societies as individualistic as ours and I don't think it ever would. My personal gripes about US government response to Covid-19 would be: It's agency in making things worse in countries it continued to sanction or support active wars in, like Iran and especially Yemen, which leads the world significantly in case-fatality. That's largely due to our pro-war foreign policy blob, which has killed a hell of a lot more people than 200,000 and displaced millions more to great public indifference. Massive relief packages to respective corporate party donors in an unprecedented upward wealth transfer with very little actually going to people who needed it. That's pretty much on the near entirety of Congress being a shameless parliament of whores. Being shamed for wearing an N99 respirator in March and told I should "donate them to health workers" by the same people that shamed others for not wearing one 1.5 months later. Fauci later admitted it was to avoid a run on masks, but that doesn't exactly engender trust with the public. The selective concern for social distancing and "the new normal" for many politicians when it was politically expedient at the expense of public health.
