I'm glad to have this thread re-activated too. It's a learning experience to see my thought process at the time, the things I was right about, and the things I was wrong about. Here are my benefit-of-hindsight observations:
1) I was probably a bit too influenced by financial media, which has a primary goal of being attention-getting.
2) I kept digging (through financial media) for a unique perspective or a piece of data that everyone else was dismissing. I believed that I would find this info, and it would be my advantage. E.g. the risk of Greece and Italy defaulting, or another mortgage crisis. The crowd was right to ignore these distractions.
3) Something about the process involved with #2 caused me to not dig into the $2.2T CARES Act as much as I should have. I couldn't tell if this was huge or a drop in the bucket compared to the impending economic damage. Obviously in hindsight it was the most important thing, and all I had to know was "don't fight the fed".
4) Even after the CARES Act started pushing stock prices back up, I still hesitated because I was seeing the rapid collapse of industry all around me. Prices seem detached from fundamentals, I told myself. Rising stock prices during a period of deflation? Really?
5) My confidence was shattered by Trump's inept leadership during the early pandemic. The Hoover administration's reaction to the 1929 stock market crash came to mind, and my imagination raced with concerns about how bad it could get. I was right that Trump's ineptitude would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and cripple the U.S's public health response, but I was wrong about the financial impact of all this suffering (see #3). I thought the rising case count would have something to do with corporate earnings, but in hindsight I was expecting the tail to wag the dog.
6) Biden's no-physical-appearances campaign strategy plus the rising stock market concerned me, and I expected Trump to win re-election. I figured that outcome might guarantee a continued failure to deal with the pandemic in 2021 (see #2). In hindsight, the election wasn't the reason the COVID wave crashed in December/January. It was the span of time without a holiday after New Year's.
7) I foresaw the development of vaccines, but I failed to foresee the speed at which highly effective vaccines were produced, approved, and distributed. At least when the Pfizer results were announced in November 2020, I went from a conservative allocation to all-in, so I salvaged 2020 in the 4th quarter and escaped with a small portfolio gain.
8) I extrapolated COVID's mortality rate and decided in early summer 2020 that the pandemic would probably kill 1M Americans. This estimate has been prescient so far, if you count official COVID deaths plus the excess death rate. However, the pandemic is clearly not done with us yet, so perhaps my estimate will turn out to be low.
Overall, I made some correct estimates about the scope of the pandemic, Trump's incompetence, and the eventuality of vaccines. However, I was mostly wrong about the financial impacts because I underweighted the impact of the CARES Act. This may reflect the difference in quality between my information sources for science information and my information sources for financial information. In the future, I should discount financial journalism, and lean harder on scientific sources like the CDC, FDA, pharma companies, or less speculative forms of news.