It is an “accident of history” that my father assigned me the chore of mowing the Wilson family graveyard and then my grandfather vividly telling me what the 1918 Spanish flu was like at Camp Zackary Taylor. In 1957 there was a H2N2 pandemic and Sputnik, but I was taught far more about Sputnik.... important bits of it false. I paid mild attention to SARS, but was interested that it was the human body’s mistaken “cytokine storm” that killed, not the virus.
Terrorists are watching and learning.
I am glad we have 50 laboratories of democracy.
Utah, Florida, Tennessee seem to have done better than New York, Michigan and Kentucky. Timing and the luxury of seeing the devastation on the horizon coming likely played a big part in the difference of your comparison. Of course one had to promptly recognize, and admit that potential, in order to act timely, and in some cases, those in charge did.
From now on each new President should require the equivalents of Dr Fauci and Dr Birx to write a twenty page personal statement of knowledge on what are the long term health effects and unknown and changing daily estimates of TOTAL death rate consequences of economic lockdowns, beyond the particular disease that caused the lockdowns. There has never been a modern lockdown like this so it should be studied in depth and peer reviewed.
President Woodrow Wilson did a really bad job of what actions were taken in 1917 to 1919. I disagree, excluding the fact Wilson had only held any elected office maybe 20? months before becoming President, and was trying to with great division in this country to keep The US out a war at the time called "The War to End All Wars", which included poison gases, unlimited submarine warfare, trench warfare, machine guns, tanks, etc and he was later on in the years mentioned opposed on nearly every front by a partisan Congress opposition seemingly jealous of the tremendous legislative success and public support he had in is early days in office. He paid a terrible personal price, too. Maybe politically in the hindsight of history, but not sure for the reason of Spanish Flu, his health seemed more impacted by the byzantine personal negotiating of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of the US to participate in the League of Nations.