This is a great summary, though I'm not a fan of the emotional commentary around it. What surprises me is that commenters in this thread seem to expect anythin

This is a great summary, though I'm not a fan of the emotional commentary around it. What surprises me is that commenters in this thread seem to expect anything different. In a democracy, the leaders we end up with are necessarily ones that are used to balancing competing interests. Every highly politicized decision making process I've been near has been like this. Leadership will 1) favor delaying to get more information over making fast decisions 2) treat contradictory sources of information as equally valid because validity is hard to judge for them (though the status of the advice-giver plays a big role) 3) try to find a compromise between competing interests instead of strongly benefiting one over the other, for as long as possible. That's not even mentioning the general disempowerment of individual actors in a bureaucracy. And this is generally a good thing! This is what you get when you optimize your governmental structures to have broad-based support. And yes it has failure modes in extreme scenarios, but the opposite is also true, it prevents extreme responses when they are unwarranted. In more general terms I'm not sure how reasonable it is to expect a democratic institution, or any institution to find a policy global maximum. This means that policy outcomes should be weighed against a reasonable counterfactual outcome, not the ideal outcome. Given the complexity of the situation, most countries did about as well as can be expected.