The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn.

(Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).

Also, we know a bunch of stuff to proactively keep us healthy but we tend not to do them very consistently when they are at odds to the normal conditions of our living - it's very easy to sit too much, neglect family and friends, eat calorie dense foods, not sleep enough, never walk 8 kilometers to get our daily bread, ingest a variety of synthetic compounds of proven bioactivity, smoke, etc. etc. etc.

As long as the pool is saying "get this thing cut out" we'll do it, but when it says, you should cut back to 30 hours of work a week and call people to hang out with more often, we'll ignore it.

To be sure it is ridiculous, but it is also traditional.