Nation/ Leader	CMO/ pandemic expert	Advice	Response	Result
USA Donald Trump	Anthony Fauci et. al.	* Flatten the curve	Did less	Major outbreak 35,000 deaths
UK Boris Johnson	Sir Patrick Valance et. al.	* Allow herd immunity * Isolate the elderly * Flatten the curve (later)	Followed	Major outbreak 14,000 deaths
Australia Scott Morrison	Prof. Brendan Murphy et. al.	* Flatten the curve * Eradication (Blakey) * Eradication not possible (Blakey)	Did more	Near-eradication 65 deaths
NZ Jacinta Ardern	Dr. Carolyn McElnay et al.	Eradication	Followed	Eradication 11 deaths

So, not much to say today except to point out that your leaders as well as your chief medical advisors are equally important to the outcome.

The US had pretty good advice from Fauci et al but were poorly prepared and slow to follow the advice. With disastrous outcome. The US missed out on eradicating it early and failed to flatten the curve sufficiently to not over-burden the health care system due to Trump’s hoping it would ‘just go away’.

Of course if not followed it would have been near-apocolyptic with millions of deaths including hundreds of thousands of young people.

The UK had terrible, callous advice from Valance which was quickly changed due to an uproar form scientists around the world. Johnson followed the advice but was delayed by Valance. So the UK similarly missed out on early eradication, this time due to poor advice.

Australia had good standard (but still cynical IMO) pandemic advice that assumes eradication is impossible. But Prof Blakey early on argued for eradication. Unfortunately he later reversed that a few days later. The PM, and especially the premiers, did MORE than asked and Australia is now in near eradication. So thanks to our leaders here in Australia, somewhat despite cynical but standard advice.

NZ seems to have had excellent advice from the start and Ardern followed it and they have essentially eradicated it.

What was missing globally was good general discussion around practical eradication vs callous herd immunity and misleading, almost-as-callous ‘flatten the curve’ rhetoric from IMO delinquent and cynical pandemic planners.