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Notes -
yes because covid came and went at roughly equal regional levels largely irrelevant of the various costly responses at different degrees throughout the world
the institutional predictions were terrible; the institutional predictions of the effects of the various measures taken were horrible
but it wasn't; claiming sarscov2 outcomes aren't as bad as many of the flu epidemics makes a categorical error by equating it to those flus and the ability of those flus to cause damage
but covid19 never was those flus; humans not noticing it at all would have been a far superior outcome to what was done once it was noticed
and if you're comparing it to bad flu years, i.e., the "historical norm," given the costs of responses this would be an argument in favor of overestimation of human ability to control and predict outcomes
you would save humanity from covid by killing most people before covid can get them; this would be "effective" at stopping covid deaths, but it would also be far worse than covid
the effects of that would be largely predictable, too
but then again, so what? mass scale slaughter is certainly power, but it's not the sort of "control" being talked about which would be represented by the ability to accurately predict outcomes and costs for inaction or various "large scale technolog[ies]" which was a horrible failure at the institutional level
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