we've been abandoned by our government (not that they cared anyways), and we're forced to go to work because of that fact. Individualism and american exceptionalism has poisoned the country, no one gives a fuck about each other, and we're all gonna fucking die because of some fucking rich colonials that thought we were special
In a large part you're not wrong, especially when it came to anticipate a second wave, but take France for example. A new lockdown was instigated on the 28th of October; check the daily new cases and consider the incubation period; there is a net, and rapid, effect. In other words: even if your country is quickly becoming plagueland because you refused to listen to scientists for the benefits of The Line, it is possible to decrease spread relatively quickly even starting on an out of control situation by implementing a full, serious lockdown.
Per that link, France has had basically the same deaths per capita as the US (48,000 out of 60 million vs. ~260k out of 325 million)
France did not do a "lockdown". Schools and factories are open! They did exactly what the US is doing, just sooner and slightly harsher, without real productive things like "test the whole city" or "isolate positive cases in special, purpose areas to minimize spread".
That's the way that it had been the whole pandemic. Europe and the US have completely failed, and then only debate is on how miserable our policy of "total failure" should make the population.
Yes, this time schools stayed opened (which I agree is stupid); and yet our curve is noticeably going down, yours isn't.
The US had a curve that lagged Europe by 2-4 weeks last time, and it's shaping up to look exactly the same as before.
The idea that Europe did "so much better" is liberal bullshit, and frankly anti-Asian racism because it hypes up countries that did just as bad as the US, while ignoring countries that did much, much better in Asia (all of them)
I mean, Europe fucked up very badly and nobody's saying that, say, Vietnam or China didn't react to this infinitely better - they did. Yet I still think Europe did better than the US.