On March 13, 2020, and later in a March 16 press conference, the administration unveiled elements of that document under the banner "15 Days to Slow the Spread." 

Almost 2 years later, Americans are still trying to return to normalcy, still clawing back their liberties, still fighting to roll back the mandates and arbitrary executive fiats, still weighing the lessons learned. 

Lesson One: Free nations should never take their cues from tyrant regimes.

Whether through incompetence or intention, the Covid-19 pandemic was born in the People's Republic of China (PRC)—and so was the playbook for responding to the pandemic. 

"It's a communist one-party state…We couldn't get away with it in Europe, we thought," as now-disgraced British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson recalls of the PRC's response to Covid-19. "And then Italy did it. And we realized we could."