I don't like "play the man not the ball" responses but I need to see more diverse sources and the peer review reflections on this, to find it believable. I'm not comfortable with how this is being sold, and the source.

Eric Hobsbawm is said to have said "counterfactual history is shit" and I think when it comes to public policy, it's doubly hard to say how re-rolling the dice plays out. Did we actually need all those mechanical breathing machines? Was it wrong to try speedrunning the development of better ones? Is how you wear PPE more or less important than just having it?

It would be foolish to assume isolation is a bad response to the next one, on the basis these authors don't think it worked for this one.

Covid has a long (economic) tail, for sure. I think it also says a lot for the fragility of the world economies considered both as isolated policy decision making spheres, and the interconnected inter-dependency, that we're still somewhat in a supply chain crisis.

Sweden decided to let old, vulnerable people just die. I suggest the Authors volunteer to go first there. (Sweden is also an economy which is happy to displace bedridden dements back to other economies because the paperwork is too hard post brexit. Thats .. pretty damn cold logic)

Did the authors actually go and look inside the rental freezer trucks in the USA and say "cool: these things work as morgues and we can re-use them to ship chicken afterward" or what?