Even where there were plans, and even if they were followed, they were mostly devised for flu, which as we have seen is different from Covid-19 in many ways. Containment doesn’t work for fast-spreading flu, but as China showed, it works for Covid-19. The WHO delayed calling Covid-19 a pandemic partly because they feared countries would abandon containment and testing and rush straight to flu-inspired social distancing—and for some countries, it may have been right about that.
