The world seemed to have a time in 2020 when it's message was unified: "flatten the curve".
But with the benefit of hindsight, we should have been saying "crash the curve". Instead we all kinda went our separate ways after Wave 1.

Some of us got back to baseline, or very close, before "opening up". Others instigated a percent positive threshold below which it was magically okay to get back out & about (as if 1 case wouldn't start it all again) but that left lots of virus spreading throughout the community.

Others encouraged everyone to get back out & save the economy.
Some had a plan for what to do next which included increasing testing & communication & border controls. Some had no plan, waiting for a vaccine. Travelling as usual, because holidays! Sun!

The result was that most places have had a ratcheting curve where the original baseline was never seen again only built upon, instead creating massive spread & more chances for a novel human virus, regardless of season, to spread rapidly and further mutate. At the same time

we build an increasingly immune population - within which some are likely to be more or less susceptible to reinfection (a perhaps rare event that will scale with infection numbers). Add to that a gradually immune population due to spike-targeted vaccines. Chances for SARS-CoV-2

..to mutate to escape that immune pressure (on-the-fly or during a reinfection, but also in new infections of those with immune compromise) abound. I don't really give two figs about whether a polymerase is or isn't more likely to introduce more mutations in this or that virus,

...because of these circumstances. We simply don't care enough to identity & communicate on a similar process occurring in our old viral enemies as they escape vaccines every damn season. Because we didn't have a global plan for what to do next, we've left ourselves in a

right mess. Smash the curve should have been followed by, "zero covid is better than rolling lockdowns, fear & widespread death & disease". High level messaging. With hindsight again, the justification should have included warnings about the risk of mutation. But it didn't.

We retreated to our own jurisdictions and, it seems to me anyway, many really didn't even bother to look out the window again to see or copy what others who were running a host of real-time experiments, could teach them. This is a pandemic but many have spent months reacting as

if it was only a local problem that could only be solved by (reinventing) creating brand new local responses. Leadership was essnetiwal for local responses but also to global ones. Next we need global leadership on whether to invest in mRNA vaccine production capacity for the

the future. Or shall we just wait and see if something better happens, as humans are so great at doing?