The main thing I know is that no one knows enough

Gee, I have been saying this ever since the COVID pandemic started:  the global patterns of COVID infection, illness, death and recovery (and the waves of these we have seen) always indicated that an enormous number of unknown or unclear factors must be going on.   Add to that the speed with which research has had to be done to develop and assess vaccines and treatments - it's been a real scientific and policy makers nightmare.

To bolster my assessment, German Lopez talks about the Florida surge, and how, in many respects, it was hard to understand:

... Florida’s example complicates any story of recent Covid-19 surges that focuses solely on reopenings and vaccinations. Something else seems to be going on, and experts aren’t totally sure what. “There are things that, to be honest, we don’t fully understand,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me.

We don’t know everything about why Covid-19 cases rise, and we don’t know everything about why they fall, either. David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu at the New York Times recently demonstrated that the coronavirus appears to follow two-month cycles in its rises and falls.

Yet, experts told them, it isn’t clear why. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

Experts point to some possible factors that contribute to trends in Covid-19 — widely discussed ones like vaccination and precautions, but also less covered issues like the weather, geographic concentration, and luck. But they acknowledge that there could be something going on that we just don’t know of or understand yet.

Figuring out all of this is crucial: It could be the difference between enabling and preventing not just the continued spread of Covid-19 but perhaps the next pandemic, too.

What's a government meant to do with such uncertainties, which make it incredibly easy for any policy mix they come up to be attacked?   

I'm not saying that governments are above criticism for policies - and certainly Right wing governments who take nonsensical attitudes towards punishing people who want to self protect are being idiotic - but my attitude towards criticism of government policies that are too strict remains slanted towards being sympathetic for the terrible difficulty they have in trying to work out what is effective and appropriate.