From a New York Times editorial today:

The Covid Policy That Really Mattered Wasn’t a Policy

You know what’s better than a vaccine mandate? A society that doesn’t need one.

We began this pandemic by asking the wrong questions, and thus we got the wrong answers. Rewind to October 2019. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative release the Global Health Security Index. It ranks 195 countries on their pandemic preparedness. Each country is judged on prevention policy, on detection capabilities, on response infrastructure, on health system capacity, on international cooperation and on underlying risk. The news is reassuring, at least if you live in the United States: We’re No. 1!

Then, only months later, we get an actual, once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States fails the test. We have more infections, more deaths, more pain and suffering and division and grief. Our performance doesn’t just fall short of rich countries like Germany and Denmark. It falls short of far poorer countries, too. The Global Health Security Index was measuring the wrong things. The researchers later noted that tucked inside the report was a finding about the United States that would prove more predictive of our response: “It had the lowest possible score on public confidence in the government.”

But that leaves the question: What were the right questions? What did we miss?