Well, what you call “extreme mitigation” has been a huge success in Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand and NZ as well as China, so that has had something to do with it.
I’m not saying the price of extreme mitigation would have been worth paying, and I don’t think people in the US or Western Europe would have done it under any circumstances anyway.
But voluntary isolation, voluntary quarantine, and treating all public spaces as if they carried equal risk had enormous cost and zero benefit. It was foolish and wasteful, and the people responsible for our ineffective and harmful policy should be held to account.
It's a lot easier to impose draconian mitigation measures in a communist dictatorship. They were welding people's doors shut so they could control traffic on and out of apartment buildings.
But voluntary isolation, voluntary quarantine, and treating all public spaces as if they carried equal risk had enormous cost and zero benefit. It was foolish and wasteful, and the people responsible for our ineffective and harmful policy should be held to account.
We had no idea what the actual risk was initially. To a large extent, we still don't. And of course there was the politics. Politics tainted every aspect of our response-another problem not found in a communist dictatorship. They wanted the economy to crash. They wanted dead Americans. They wanted Trump to fail. This was their agenda throughout 2020. It tainted everything.