The Mother Jones site has compiled this timeline of the spread of COVID-19. It's long but it's worth going through, day by day, watching an amazing array of statements by our leaders which with the little bit of hindsight we now have, look irredeemably wrong.
One might forgive a lot of the mistakes of a scientific nature. The virus was new and it was not possible to know for sure everything people demanded to know about it when they demanded to know about it. The cautious statements — the ones qualified with the caveat that more research was needed and that some counsel was tentative — look very wise now. So many which were presented with absolute certainty — apart from "wear a mask," "wash your hands" and "socially-distance" — were absolutely wrong.
This is not the time to get angry at or to try and shame the folks who thought the whole thing was a hoax and they certainly didn't need to wear one of those stupid masks. We need those people to back down from those positions and do what real experts have said since about the second week of this catastrophe. If they stubbornly insist to gather in unmasked groups and to scream at Costco greeters who won't let them in with nude faces, they could keep this thing going for a long time.