We seem to have handled it competently this time around, what has happened elsewhere is, in my opinion, down to incompetence.
To be fair to the rest of the world outside the what, 5 countries that didn't have a calamitous response and didn't wait for WHO advice, the delayed reaction caused a knee jerk response that was lagging actual events by about 6 weeks.
There is evidence this Virus was already out before 2020 maybe as early as Oct Nov last year
In Dec 2019 Taiwan told the WHO they have seen human to human transmission, on Jan 14 2020 WHO said no evidence (WHO does not recognise Taiwan, who is not allowed into it, because China reckons Taiwan is theres and WHO "doesn't want to get involved in politics")
This put the world at a disavantage
Plus Chinese covid death numbers are bollocks. Look at London, and Look at Wuhan, people are way more a vector to spread in Wuhan than London, the wet markets and all that ****. No ****in way they had a couple of thousand deaths. So anyway China's concealment meant this got out before anyone even knew.
The media drove a public panic, by initially showing images of people falling over in China (which portrayed it as being so bad that people were just dropping in the streets, which was utterly false and dangerous) and they kept reporting over and over "panic buying" which caused a real panic buying situation nationally, they were showing items "running out" when there was only a slight lag in supply from the warehouses because the demand exceeded the weekly delivery schedules, that was grossly irresponsible
You had other media saying it's not as bad as the flu. Causing even more confusion in the public
WHO says masks dont work (to try save PPE for medical staff, they recently admitted this) then said they do work.
(there is still no evidence they actually are effective at all) BUT WEAR ONE ANYWAY JUST IN CASE
The public fear, hiked up to the max by the media, and the absolutely bogus SAGE modeling (they gave their model to Microsoft to fix and in two months they couldn't fix it, Senior google engineers said the model was a piece of ****, Neil Ferguson built it himself, HOLY ****!) really drove the gov and institutions into panicked reactionary mode in the early stages while politicians viewed economy through the career lens of course which delayed reaction further imo
That modelling and the media driven panic had a knockon effect on the very people who see everything through a lense of their career and position.. politicians.
Then the tragic comedy skit started.