Western countries won’t let an expert make the call, because there hasn’t been recent enough pain and suffering to put it in recent memory the necessity for it.

Western countries won’t let an expert make the call, because there hasn’t been recent enough pain and suffering to put it in recent memory the necessity for it. After all, why suffer if it isn’t actually necessary? Asia had recent experience with the first SARS, which had very real and extremely high fatality rates, so for them it was a relatively easy (not an easy) call. For the west, when was the last time we had a real pandemic that actually killed a lot of people? Almost a century ago. Somewhat ironically because the west listened to experts for a very long time. Notably, the last time it had a major issue also coincided with a world war.