San Francisco has had less than 1/3 as many deaths per capita as the US national average, and somewhere between a third and half of the deaths SF did have can be attributed to one terrible policy mistake – re-opening indoor bars and restaurants in fall 2020 – which immediately kicked off 2–3 months of fast exponential growth. If the rest of the USA had been even as fast acting and careful as SF, more than half a million dead Americans would still be alive.

And there are plenty of countries around the world which have done a much better job than SF of testing, contact tracing, vaccination, etc. We can compare e.g. Sweden to other Nordic countries to see what an abysmal failure the Swedish “herd immunity” strategy turned out to be.

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“We haven’t tried anything and we’re all out of ideas” is easy to sell to grumpy people tired of a really shitty year or two, on the back of an unprecedented wave of anti-public-health propaganda, but it is an absolutely terrible pandemic response.