Comparing different governments means comparing different cultures of people as well. It's not clear if comparing the same government over time is isolating government response, medical learning, environmental changes, or cultural changes among the people.

America's biggest failure against COVID was to not take it seriously enough at the citizen level. The government response failed when we didn't have a quick test rolled out quickly and even after we realized that was our problem we still didn't get a same-day test rolled out at scale.