States with highest death tolls pursued same approach. Nursing homes placed on the front lines of epidemic. Suppression strategies (closing schools, shelter in place, etc) increased total death toll. Doing *nothing at all* would have been a much better strategy than what we did.

It's interesting how we all initially mocked the authoritarian dictatorships like Turkmenistan, which simply refused to acknowledge the existence of the virus.

In the end, these states' laughably corrupt approaches to dealing with the pandemic were far superior to ours.

Another example is Belarus. They decided they weren't going to change anything. Continued life as normal. No sign of mass graves and total chaos. No societal disaster (other than living under an authoritarian system of course). We mocked these approaches. Turns out we were wrong.

In the free world, all of the momentum was in the direction of taking the lockdown approach, which is kind of paradoxical, given it is a very unfree way of doing things. In the end, Idk how we could have avoided it. Every country made the wrong decision, w very few exceptions.