Virological Calvinism
It is always dangerous when a non-religious person tries to make a statement about religious belief, especially when we get to complicated arguments about double predestination and supralapsarianism. But for our limited purposes in this post, in Calvinism salvation and damnation are pre-ordained by God at the beginning of time --thus faith and good works have no bearing on being saved or damned.
I have come to believe that this is largely true of COVID-19, ie that the actions of man (at least as far as non-pharmaceutical interventions are concerned) have little or nothing to do with case rates and virus spread in any particular region. Different geographies have different seasons for the virus, and trying to attribute low case rates or high case rates to the presence or lack of government interventions / restrictions is futile. You can see that as location after location that was praised or damned at some point for its supposed good or bad handling of the virus have since seen opposite results.
There are a few exceptions to this, but very few. On the positive side, the accelerated vaccine development programs were a near miracle, producing multiple viable vaccines WAY faster than I ever thought possible. On the negative side, ordering infected people into long-term care facilities was a disaster. But beyond these few exceptions, most of everything else didn't do squat. The great regression analysis someone does someday on virus transmission rates across geographies is going to have seasonal variables, demographics, and urbanization with most of the explanatory power.
