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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.
When I argue with my coworkers and other pro-Lockdown types its all about how it was poorly defined, blew our load on an important public health intervention, failure of implementation and buy in etc etc.
When it's the anti-Lockdown types its almost always "bruh, you know COVID was real right?"
I mean sure a lot of people ended up believing it was fake, but to take their perspective, the government was pretty much lying about everything all the time. They said as a slogan that it was “2 weeks to flatten the curve.” After 3-4 months with no end in sight, the people saw that as a lie. The messaging on masks did two complete separate 180s. Masks don’t work until they do, except ooops they were wrong and it actually doesn’t work. The vaccines will prevent you from getting Covid, until it was obvious they didn’t, at which point they protected other people, until it was obvious that this wasn’t happening either. Then the vaccines were supposed to be based on a place that didn’t mutate much. Except that that section does mutate a lot and now you need a booster every year for the new variant. And so after the fourth or fifth obvious falsehood, it’s not really that surprising to me that people who lost their freedom because they obeyed a government that lied to them a lot might start questioning the virus that’s at the bottom of this whole thing. They’re under arbitrary rules that are quite often not only making them miserable, but costing them money and opportunities, with no end in sight, with moving goalposts and lots of guilt tripping over any questioning or noncompliance.
If the government wants the trust of the people, it must be trustworthy.
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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.
Every single one of these consequences were because of the massively extended lockdowns and the medical/governmental apparatus refusing to lose any face. No shit the industry wasn't doing as much routine medical activity when going to urgent care required multiple tests, staying in your car, poorly-developed ass-covering questionnaires, etc. etc. etc.
And this is explained by some mythical massive death toll in the medical industry, instead of giant healthcare conglomerates and regulatory capture? Come on man. This is just the Obamacare nightmare 14 years in. Buckle up, it's not going to get any better.
I can't take this seriously after seeing the rock-hard erections in the pants of every petty tyrant nurse, doctor, or administrator that lasted 2 years instead of 4 hours. The sanctimonious slow the spread shit that got jettisoned the moment some race riots needed to be sanctioned by the entire industry. Miss me with this gaslighting.
No?
You think Ophthalmologists were being pulled to do critical care because of COVID tests requirements at outpatient offices?
It frustrates me how lockdown/COVID skeptics can be more or less directionally correct and still worse than the supporters at the same time. Stop and think about your claims for a second.
I feel like every study I have read has found very little impact on deaths pre-vaccine, with almost all differences being post vaccine. This would seem to go against your thesis?
In addition, you seem to be missing that people would engage on some level of precautions regardless of what is mandated, just by looking around (for example, restaurant reservations dropped drastically in NY while De Blasio was still telling people to go celebrate Chinese New Years)
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