I share your frustration, but no one in this chain above rewrote history. Everyone agrees that the US response to covid was abjectly terrible. The response sho

I share your frustration, but no one in this chain above rewrote history. Everyone agrees that the US response to covid was abjectly terrible. The response should have been to suddenly and dramatically develop a capacity for producing masks. It’s true that in the early days we weren’t sure if it was transmission through air or contaminated surfaces that was more problematic, but we can already wash our hands. We can’t stop breathing. Instead, the US president spent months attacking anyone who said covid is a problem, the CDC screwed up testing, and health authorities backpedaled on masks while giving conspiracy theory-level justifications. I was there too. The really sad part is that now we know how to get this under control (and a few countries that really tried everything, like those listed by GP, got it right at the outset), but the politics have become so fraught that I doubt we’ll this under control in the US before it’s spread to everyone.