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To be fair we understand viruses far better than we used to. I wish there could be a coherent position around yes we can have lockdowns but only if the virus is literally civilization ending.
Do we, in a way that's meaningful for what many governments sought to do in 2020? We might know more on paper, but it's not clear to me that any of this knowledge had an impact for the goal of "protection against pandemics", which is distinct from mitigation. The information overload and the delusion that modelling would be accurate made things worse, not better. And for the more cynical, if covid was a result of gain of function research, then instead of protecting against pandemics, this additional understanding instead caused the pandemic.
Governments can define what viruses are civilization ending. We know this because they already did this sort of redefinition before, not just for covid-19 but also for swine flu.
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Then you get the "experts" declaring the next flu season as civilization ending.
Yeah correct course of action is caution in the beginning - as we learn it's weak just ignore it. Problem is 'experts' apparently are unwilling or unable to publicly admit being wrong.
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