The global reaction to COVID-19 was unprecedented. Government actions proposed, promoted, mandated and enforced to modify the risks to individuals and society as a whole were orders of magnitude more intrusive than any other risk-intervention policies ever promoted, proposed or implemented by most governments in the past. This was a truly radical global intervention by governments to control a novel biological risk.

But the wildly diverging impacts and likely effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of these various strategies suggest an equally wild divergence in the understanding of COVID-19 itself—its size, mass, shape, physical nature, potential interactions, exposure, viral uptake, established infection, reproduction and so on. Today, in the pandemic’s wake, perhaps we can put some of those risks and risk-management strategies in perspective to help make sense of COVID public policies—what was suggested, what was mandated, what was rational, and what was irrational.