Australia

The biggest problem we faced in 2020 was that the federal government of the day dropped the ball. One of the federal government's primary duties is border control. The borders should have closed and national quarantine facilities engaged to control and protect repatriated citizens.

This ended up being left to the State Governments. And in fairness, the premiers stepped in and filled that void as best they could. It was heartening - party politics took a back seat to addressing issues that faced everyone. Internally, the states had a real mixed bag of responses - and their varying levels of success should be case studies on how to approach this in the future. Melbourne locked down, and while that was no fun for anyone, the death rates of Melbourne are a tiny fraction of any comparable city in the USA.

WA just shut the whole border. This had its challenges, but from within we cruised through 2020 and 2021 as though there was no pandemic. A couple of short, sharp semi-lockdowns in there when the odd minor outbreak threatened is all.

NSW dabbled a bit with locking down, but opened up again too quickly. We saw the effects that had on case numbers.

It isn't that the public doesn't trust the measures employed - it's that they were a patchwork of different measures and they had varying degrees of success. Hopefully, the next time this happens, the federal government will learn from 2020 and step in with a nation-wide response that we can all get behind.