with Covid is that we politicized it from day one - and the previous poster is a perfect example of that.

I had no issues with the initial response. We had no idea what we had on our hands, and a lot of people died in those early days. One thing we did know... We'd have significant capacity issues in our healthcare system if the virus proved particularly virulent. Managing that capacity (making sure it was available for those that really needed it) and managing cost seemed very sensible at the time. We also had real supply chain issues. Remember the issues with meatpacking plants in those first several weeks? We needed to process, we needed to learn.
But we quickly had people talking about affronts to their "freedoms" rather than getting in line.

My issue is that, while we did take a hard tack initially, we didn't process learnings very quickly and tack back where we could. Schools are a perfect example of that. People started to travel again, yet we couldn't get people back to offices. The bickering continued. Some leaders were trying to kill teachers. Others were trying to jam unsafe vaccines into people's arms. We couldn't have rational discussions and formulate policy based on what we saw happening both here and abroad. Clearly we also didn't have very much leadership, and too many in the media decided to not let the crisis go to waste and worked to appeal to our worst sensibilities.

To sum it up. We performed amazingly well in some respects (developing the vaccine, keeping people healthy), but absolutely terribly in others - the politicization of the whole thing was really pathetic in retrospect. Like I've said before. If we had this population in the 1940s, most of our friends in Europe would be speaking German today. NFW we could fight or win that war.

And we spent way too much, and probably "invested" it in all the wrong places.