I honestly believe that everyone did it wrong and some of this was nefarious and used for political and societal control, and others were just following what the rest of the world's leaders were doing. Of course we now know that all of this made almost no difference at all.

In my community of around 100,000 people, we decided a year and a half ago that we were not going to comply with government mandates and our local leaders, realizing that we would vote them out if they tried to enforce them.... sided with us and we refused to comply with masks, social distancing, quarantine, or really anything at all related to Covid. We went back to "normal" long before we were technically allowed to.

We were warned that we were giving our community a death sentence...... and this never happened. Our percentages were right in line with everyone else's in the state and the country.