> What are some of those "obvious good policy decisions"?

I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.

Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.

The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.

> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.

Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.

> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.

Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.

> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.
Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.

According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.

> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.

Sweden did not “do nothing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...).

> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.

I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.

> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.

The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/

> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.

This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.

The decision of St. James's parish to remove a handle from a well pump is the canonical example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...) Should they have done nothing instead?

I enjoy civilization. I choose to live in a city. This requires compromises due to density. Should we have no regulation for how sewage is treated?