Pandemic lessons learned

At this point, a year after the pandemic impacted our lives, I think we can look back and see with less smoke, what we, as a country did right and what we did wrong in addressing Covid-19. We have a great country. We struggled as did many others. We lost a lot of lives but I’ve always believed that life is the cost of freedom in many respects.

A few areas that we argued about-

Masks
Social distancing
Hand washing
Testing
Quarantine
Travel
Messaging
Shutdowns
Healthcare

All issues we dealt with as a country at one point or another.

Trump gets a lot of flack but imo, he was trying to put lipstick on a pig and perhaps he was too optimistic about the outcome. 500,000 deaths later, it appears as though this thing was real and it was deadly. Certainly many of those deaths had co-morbidities.
Many didn’t though. I know of several lives lost too soon.

Messaging; the initial messaging from a federal level was bad. I appreciated the daily briefings but they were often jumbled from a messaging standpoint. Then they got to be sparring matches with the media.

Do masks work or not? There’s evidence on both sides of the argument. Some masks work better than others though and that, I think is certain. I hated to see the topic become political though. It didn’t have to be that way. Messaging was poor there.

Social distancing works.
Quarantining works.

The one area that I found to be incredibly flawed was in testing. It was a shitshow. Not sure who is to blame there. If we had a quick test like we do for the flu, we would have had fewer shutdowns, and ultimately fewer deaths. Instead we had a lack of testing and then long waits for the tests that were available. Unacceptable. So for me, testing was the biggest flaw.

Had testing been effective and efficient, the shutdowns would have been unnecessary!

Successes- with so many deaths it seems Pollyanna to point out successes but I think we can say that our healthcare system handled the situation successfully. Death is unfortunate but without any treatment, no one did much better. I think our survival rate is in the top 5 worldwide. Many predicted that our private healthcare system would not perform well.

Other successes- the nfl and college football.
We didn’t have the outbreaks that many predicted. They did something right.

As the light begins to shine through the tunnel, I think we can agree that we all learned a lot. I know we can attest to our resilience. We’re blessed in many ways. Sometimes we just have to take a moment to realize it.