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Notes -
People in Medicine are really nervous, you are right that public health entities burned through basically all the credibility they had last time, but at current expectations this Avian flu would be be worse than COVID and U.S. healthcare (and likely everywhere else) has basically burned through every ounce of slack it had including things like people's willingness to work and mental health. A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.
I don’t think the Covid-deniers did miss that; it’s everyone else who failed to see the issue. Opposition to lockdowns was the single thing that united all the various types of skeptics.
I think you misunderstand, even with the reduction in cases because of lockdowns our hospital infrastructure almost collapsed (and would have without them, at least initially).
Denier/skeptic types don't realize how bad it was in the beginning. I've seen plenty of people here doubt the seriousness of COVID, call complaints of full hospitals etc as fake news, and so on.
Just from my own perspective, I don’t think the problem was the initial reaction. The problem was that there was no real thought into what was going to be the sustainable solution to the need to slow spread while still giving people freedom and not destroying the economy. There were no end dates or mitigation mechanisms, no advice on what kinds of activities were high or low spread, or what types of environments were conducive to spread. So they just locked everything up indefinitely just to be sure and lied about the dangers so that the people were too scared of Covid to make rational decisions.
And to me that damned the whole thing. Nobody will trust a system that cannot be honest or upfront about dangers and trade offs and how the economy could actually function when nobody can leave the house without government permission. It further gave no criteria or end dates to the emergency. 2 weeks to flatten the curve became 2 months, than nearly 6 months. Because of all of this, the government simply lost all credibility, not just in health (and being Frank, no matter how bad the next pandemic gets, lockdowns are off the table, and good luck with vaccines) but in almost everything else. If the government lied about this in a power grab, what else are they lying about. (I personally think at least some of the popularity of Qanon and later election denial is down to the loss of trust that came out of the lockdown experience. People felt abused and lied to by their own government, and as such, conspiracy theories telling them the government was lying about other things and using its power to manipulate them into things that benefit them). That trust is unlikely to come back for at least a generation and maybe longer than that.
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When you say collapse, what exactly do you have in mind? Are we talking about a triage situation or something more long-term damaging? If it’s the former, I would consider the situation deeply unfortunate, but it’s also something that would resolve itself in relatively short order.
Take the issue of ventilator shortages, which I recall being a real problem in some areas in early to mid-2020. It’s horrifying if you’re a Covid patient who needs a ventilator but who can’t get one, but I wouldn’t consider the deaths that resulted from such shortages to constitute collapse of the hospital infrastructure.
Also, on the topic of lockdowns, it seems to me that we went about it in exactly the wrong way. Assuming we were going to do some kind of lockdown regardless, it seems to me that we should have forced the at-risk portions of the population to isolate, directed the fountain of free federal money to “reward” those who stayed on the job, let the disease rip through the healthy population, then rescinded all lockdown measures once the number of cases was low enough that there was little risk of overwhelming the hospital systems. You’re still running rough-shod over some people’s freedoms, but that seemed to be inevitable by March of 2020, and at least this plan seems like it would have been less destructive and more effective.
The purpose of the original management of masks and the overall lockdown approach was to buy time for hospitals and other aspects of healthcare to adjust and to do things like "smooth out the curve." This was mostly a success. Messaging around this was terrible, and public health and governmental identities (and the media) couldn't stop themselves from lying and misunderstanding.
These policies overstaying their welcome has nothing to do with the early need. You of course also have other nonsense like trying to prevent people from staying outside away from each other in a park. The damage from overzealous, unscientific, and downright retarded policy decisions is immense.
But the lockdown was still a good idea.
Hospitals had to shut down elective procedures. They had ophthalmologists and dermatologists managing critical care patients. Routine medical activity and screening shut down in a way that will increase mortality and morbidity for decades. Medical education, which is expensive, complicated, and slow was paused or had quality go down for years. Many doctors and other staff died, retired, moved out of clinical practice, or dramatically reduced their hours, and the shortages and other problems caused by this are only growing worse and have a tremendous lagging effect. It's taking time and a multifactorial problem but hospitals are shutting down all over the U.S. and it's becoming increasingly impossible to get certain types of care in some states or regions.
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
Lockdowns were a violation of freedoms. They were absolutely a necessary violation of freedom for a time. They were not a necessary violation later, but persisted anyway.
Most lockdown deniers types seem to realize they were right about lockdowns being misused and then leverage that into thinking that COVID was just as bad as a regular flu, that everything was fine or a hysteria, or that because we didn't load up some random ship with COVID patients that everything was fine, or that running out ventilators will cause some people to die but cause absolutely no other problems.
It's a massive Dunning-Kruger issue that seems tremendously over represented in the population of rat-adjacent people.
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Can you say more about this? Do you know anything more than what has been in the MSM so far?
The good news: it's pure "oh shit this could kick of." So far. I don't have any particular special information at this time but haven't seen anything more than all the other times it almost happens and then doesn't.
The bad news: all the revision, hysteria, and poor decisions about COVID has resulted in most people forgetting just how bad COVID was, and this will likely be worse. Our healthcare infrastructure may not survive another hit of that magnitude.
I can’t speak to most people, but I remember how bad it was. It was so bad that New York City had to bring in emergency 1,000-bed hospital ships in order to handle the overflow of cases. Of course, those ships sat virtually empty and unused, and their large crew of medical workers basically got to enjoy a free holiday, but still, they had to bring in ships! It was so bad, Covid-positive patients had to be rehoused away from the hospitals and into
empty schoolsnursing homes, for some reason. It was so bad that nurses were so exhausted, they barely had the time and energy to make TikTok videos to help keep people’s spirits up as they were imprisoned in their homes. It was bad.Well, I guess thank you for appearing on command and making my point for me.
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