There was no pan-Euro response nor was there a pan-American response, so these groupings are arbitrary. Unless you have an objective "score" that Euro lockdowns and policies on average went further than American lockdown policies, these numbers are meaningless.

You could easily justify the differences as deriving from Europe having an objectively healthier population and better healthcare systems than the US.

With such drastic policy differences you would expect to see a larger effect.

Look at the trends in Italy, UK, US, for example.

I agree the vaccine helps, but there is no clear impact on reducing spread if you look at infection data in aggregate.

We've gone from 0% vaccinated, to 60-70% with no discernable dip in infection counts.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

But the virus is endemic and vaccines will not stop it from being caught by everybody at some point.

You can't lockdown the virus away. You can't stop the spread by canceling flights either. Just seems like awful policymaking driven by virtue signaling.

Covid is here forever, and that's life.

It is not the vaccine passports that stopped lockdown - in fact, there is no evidence they had any effect on transmission.

You are just pushing the work to be done by low-level employees at this point. Yes, it can work for a while but go talk to anyone who works in public event spaces (theaters, bars, cinemas, etc.) in, for example, Germany and you will see how much fatigue this causes.

And what happens when people get fatigued due to the extra workload created by forcing these measures to be taken by small businesses? People get sloppy, they get tired of a procedure that usually would take 2 minutes taking 15, chipping time away from other duties they are responsible for (and supervised). Over time they stop doing the checks properly and just like with other COVID measures, becomes increasingly ineffective.

I only had this realisation after chatting with some friends of friends in Berlin working in hospitality (hotels, bars, etc.) and events, almost every single one of them were exhausted from having to perform the extra checks on every customer, every shift, every play, every table they sit. They were trying really hard to not get sloppy because they actually care about the people, but it was clear how it was affecting them. It didn't look as a sustainable measure against COVID after 2 years of a pandemic.

That was also the fear I read voiced by experts during the first 6 months of the pandemic: people will get tired of the measures, when they get tired and don't follow them anymore it gets much worse. How to balance that is exactly all this political game going on, there is no simple solution when we talk about population levels of a nation.

Also in NY (upstate). I can recall my passport being checked only once or twice since the beginning of the pandemic. I assume you're referring to NYC?

One of the things I see "going on in Australia". Australia has had around 8 covid deaths per 100K population. Compared to, say, the United States with 237 covid deaths per 100K population. I see that and still think it's about a virus, yup.

In general over the past two years as a whole, people in Australia have lived with fewer restrictions or changes to everyday life than here in the US, with an order of magnitude fewer deaths. I still think it's about a virus, yup.

(I do not necessarily endorse international travel restrictions, including the ones the USA is enforcing, which seem to be pretty fruitless, and in some cases stricter than Australia's. I think they are mistaken. But it's about a virus, yup. Among other things, certainly US general xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment are involved in ours too. I too worry that we are imposing controls we will never see the end of, including related to border-crossing, which suits the agenda of some just fine. I'm sure it's about more than one thing in Australia too. Human things usually are. But it's about a virus, yup.).

There are of course density, age, and other differences to consider.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Sweden's numbers are really good all things considered [1]

This defies intuition, we would expect a "no restrictions" policy to result in significantly worse outcomes. Maybe the take away is that a healthier population and a better healthcare system is a more significant factor than restrictions and mandates?

[1] https://ncov2019.live/data/europe

It’s also significantly better (x2-x4) than Israel by every excess death measure, where Israel locked down super seriously and vaccinated super quickly.

So you can’t conclude “it didn’t end well”

By then it's too late. Obviously.

That's the problem with exponential growth. Not much seems to happen until suddenly it all happens at once, and the only chance to prevent that was a few weeks ago.

That's not how epidemiology or even science works. There are so many variables at play that a response in one region might not make sense in another region, and the same goes for the virus's behavior.