Most of those were political decisions, not ones made by domain experts. First, the delay of listening to domain experts (In america, the firing of any teams a

Most of those were political decisions, not ones made by domain experts. First, the delay of listening to domain experts (In america, the firing of any teams and staff that were trained in dealing with a pandemic, for example), and the delay in shutting down cross-country transportation as well as the delay in implementing social-distancing, led to the large spread of Coronavirus that is continuing to this day. Secondly, the reason people were informed not to wear masks initially was because there was a PPE shortage. Part of this was very likely related to the fact that I remember reports of people stealing boxes of masks from hospitals, and people stockpiling masks early on, which led to hospitals that were much less equipped to deal with the spread of it and led to higher deaths of healthcare workers. The reason Coronavirus got to the stage where it could mutate, at least in Britain, was because the Government instituted a policy of blatantly letting people die and assuming "herd immunity" would take hold, versus actually listening to the domain experts saying that was a shitty idea. If they had listened to them in the first place, and shut things down early on, the pandemic still wouldn't be going a year later. As you can see in China, Taiwan, etc.