The issue with "what could we do better" is that in a system of intelligent free actors (as opposed to some sort of sim game in which the 'creator' has control over everything) the actions that people take will change depending on the effects (for example lethality) of the virus in question.
There are personal values in play here, but very roughly, if we have a pandemic with an x% risk of death or serious debilitating injury then it's worth spending x% of our time, resources, etc trying to prevent its' spread.
Everyone is going to have a different number there, some will think we should just never give up ever, others will just think "screw it, I'll take the personal risk", but that's a good average.
We do this all of the time - people can get post viral syndromes from common colds, but we accept that this is an incredibly unlikely situation and so most people don't get into a panic when around other people.
And that's actually what we saw with coronavirus. The vast, vast majority of people at least in the first weeks of the pandemic took it seriously. After a few months a lot of people simply stopped caring because it wasn't as fatal as we feared. For whatever reason this became extremely politicised in a way that I can't quite understand.
I think people stop caring, because it is impossible to keep up a high level of vigilance for an extended period of time. Plus the risk becomes normalized.
People are not very good at evaluating risk. From an evolutionary perspective, we mainly do it by copying others. I cannot comprehend what a X% fatality rate really means on a personal safty evaluation. But seeing what other people are doing gives favorable odds. Of course, this heuristic has its pros and cons.
There are personal values in play here, but very roughly, if we have a pandemic with an x% risk of death or serious debilitating injury then it's worth spending x% of our time, resources, etc trying to prevent its' spread.
Everyone is going to have a different number there, some will think we should just never give up ever, others will just think "screw it, I'll take the personal risk", but that's a good average.
We do this all of the time - people can get post viral syndromes from common colds, but we accept that this is an incredibly unlikely situation and so most people don't get into a panic when around other people.
And that's actually what we saw with coronavirus. The vast, vast majority of people at least in the first weeks of the pandemic took it seriously. After a few months a lot of people simply stopped caring because it wasn't as fatal as we feared. For whatever reason this became extremely politicised in a way that I can't quite understand.