Do we ever learn from our mistakes?

Just over a hundred years ago, the world went through another pandemic, the ‘Spanish flu’ when between February 1918 and April 1920 about 500 million people were infected and between a conservative estimate 20 million up to 100 million people died and was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.
Just as in 1918 in the United States where the pandemic originated as patient zero was trace to a poultry farm worker in the US. The President at the time just like Trump did over 100 years later, played down the seriousness of the disease, and The Prime minister at the time just like Boris Johnson followed with the same rhetoric.

At the start of the Spanish flu, counties like Australia and New Zealand closed their borders and enforced a strict level of quarantining and so they got the infection under control and so got back to normality far quicker and with far fewer deaths than the rest of the world.
100 years later the same counties who in 1918 buried their heads in the sand and told their populations that the pandemic is a hoax or is nothing serious are the same counties who are still in denial about the present Covid-19 pandemic and are suffering a horrific level of death and suffering. Australia and New Zealand who once again took precaution immediately have relatively minor levels of death.
Nothing has been learned by Europe, and the US, or most of the South American countries. A thing to note is that most of the countries that are suffering due to denial of the seriousness of the pandemic are lead by right-wing populist leaders, like Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lopez Obrador in Mexico.
Like all populist leaders they come to power promising the earth, knowing full well they can’t deliver on their promises and just tell the crowds what they want to hear regardless of the facts. They are in reality only in it for power, prestige, and money. The trait of a genuine and true leader is what they do in a crisis, and boy is the pandemic a crisis.

Not one of these so-called populist leaders has acted like a true leader, and given priority to their nation’s health over the wealth of their nations. If they had all acted swiftly and with decisive authority right at the beginning and closed the borders and introduced strict quarantining and lockdown, instead of half-hearted token gestures and making dubious on the fly laws that they do not strictly enforce, we would not be in the complete mess we are still in at the moment.

Many people in Australia and New Zealand are perplexed at the British government is only now strictly enforcing quarantine restrictions and still not even partially closed the countries borders a whole year after this mess started. Did we not go through the fiasco that was Brexit to get back control of our borders (something we had all along in the first place) just so we can leave ours open for everyone to just wander in without any sort of testing and the French, an EU country, closed their borders just as they were always entitled to.

Thankfully, although the borders are still open for all, some countries have now been placed on a restrictive red entry list and anyone coming in from these countries must be proven to Covid-19 free and go into forced hotel quarantine for 14 days in an approved hotel at their own expense.
This new enforcement has I’m afraid, come far, far too late in the day. Kind of bolting the stable door after the horse has already bolted. None of this would be needed if we had done this in the beginning.