> The US is stuck in limbo. Some states locked down hard, others didn't lock down enough.
Umm, I think you mean the world. the nordics can't decide what do do with Sweden. New Zealand will be perpetually close to zero cases, but be sealed off from the world. Obviously US/Brazil tourism is good to go.
> Some states locked down hard, others didn't lock down enough.
On the world scale, India locked down hard, but failed because arguably, the hard lockdown created more problems. I think Sweden had fewer cases per capita at the peak than the UK, despite avoiding a formal lockdown, but Norway had even fewer. A lot of factors you'd think would be meaningful haven't been, and the ones we're left with is developed East-Asian countries did OK, isolated developed countries did OK, countries lead by populists haven't done so well, and North Korea still claims to have zero cases.
Not most of Europe and East Asia, and a smattering of countries that have had effective responses. They have suppressed the epidemic to the point where they can reopen most things. They have to be vigilant and monitor the R value, but as long as it hovers around 1, they're okay. The levels of their epidemics are also low enough that they can do effective contact tracing (see, for example, what happened in Beijing recently).
In the US, by contrast, there are tens of thousands of new cases every day. Contact tracing is impossible at that point, and parts of the US will probably have to go into lockdown again, unless the US is willing to accept hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. A sharp lockdown lasting about 6 weeks would have put the US in a much better position.
> the nordics can't decide what do do with Sweden.
Because Sweden refused to lock down. This is the fault of Swedish politics, not the other Nordic countries that took effective action to suppress the virus.
> I think Sweden had fewer cases per capita at the peak than the UK, despite avoiding a formal lockdown
The UK has had a particularly bad epidemic because early on, the government pursued a "herd immunity" strategy. They waited far too long before locking down.
Umm, I think you mean the world. the nordics can't decide what do do with Sweden. New Zealand will be perpetually close to zero cases, but be sealed off from the world. Obviously US/Brazil tourism is good to go.
> Some states locked down hard, others didn't lock down enough.
On the world scale, India locked down hard, but failed because arguably, the hard lockdown created more problems. I think Sweden had fewer cases per capita at the peak than the UK, despite avoiding a formal lockdown, but Norway had even fewer. A lot of factors you'd think would be meaningful haven't been, and the ones we're left with is developed East-Asian countries did OK, isolated developed countries did OK, countries lead by populists haven't done so well, and North Korea still claims to have zero cases.