And why shouldn't we include these effects as "collateral damage" of the pandemic? Any time the health system is threatened by a new virus that could overwhelm it, resources are going to be diverted in advance to cope with that. That's the sensible way of dealing with a potentially catastrophic threat.
And if you want to assess whether the cure is worse than the disease, the relevant point of comparison is the number of people that would have died if we had allowed the virus to run through the population and potentially overwhelm the health system. Not then number of people who have actually died. If someone calls the fire department because your house is on fire and the firefighters break down your door, you may be worse off than you were yesterday if you have to pay the insurance deductible for a new door. But you are not worse off than you would have been if the firefighters had not turned up and your house had burnt down!
A successful intervention may lead to few deaths, but that does not mean the intervention was unnecessary. Just like the fact that firefighters caught a fire before it got out of control, does not mean there was no point calling them in the first place.
I'm not interested in the all or nothing oversimplifications. We're on the same page, those responses were collateral damage. My point is that those excess deaths aren't solely based on covid which was his basis for the argument.
What it might look if you let the virus run free usually gets simplified to the point where it becomes a team sport, Team Lockdown vs Team Business As Usual, especially after the panic-inducing media coverage gave everyone the impression covid alone killed those nearly 800,000 people worldwide. That narrative is burned into everyone's mind and countering it takes a great deal of effort that many are quick to dismiss unless it comes from the very sources that misled/deceived them in the first place. It's like waiting for CNN, NBC or the New York Times to tell you they spent four years deceiving you about Donald Trump, it won't happen.
Think of it this way, imagine social media didn't exist and our press/media was acting far more responsibly by delivering all the relevant facts and not just those that help them create/perpetuate sensational narratives. Do you honestly believe our response to this pandemic would have been anywhere near the same? I definitely don't, it would be a night and day difference. Comparing media coverage of covid-19 to H1N1 in 2009 is a decent enough way to see how much things have changed in these last 11 years.
I spend too much time "deprogramming" people that rely on the mainstream news, I know how influential it remains. The internet was supposed to help us more easily share information and become more informed, but when governments or corporate giants control that flow of information then the internet's not much different than sitting in front of an NBC Nightly News or CNN broadcast on TV, you take what they give you as gospel because they've silenced or denigrated dissenting views.
"Cooler heads prevail," but those cooler heads have become a minority. Seems everyone's
anxious or
angry about something and that rarely leads to productive discussion. It's the divide and conquer approach which is working exceptionally well considering so little attention is being given to the source of all this madness, the Chinese Communist party.
The manner in which each national government went about responding to this pandemic is almost negligible in the grand scheme of things because factors like population sizes/density/health, geographic location, economic activity and that it was covered up by the CCP for weeks had much more to do with the way it spread. What good is shutting down for weeks/months and returning to almost normal when all it takes to close everything back down is a handful of cases? This virus isn't going anywhere, that approach is ridiculous. The emergency has passed in most places, we successfully flattened the curve.
The general consensus I've gleaned from those most worried about this virus: draconian measures and authoritarian rule are preferable to liberty. If you believe the CCP was responsible for making this the mess we know today, and I do, then is there any reason to believe that's not by design? They're in the process of conditioning hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people into becoming more sympathetic to the way they operate.
The dangers of our broken and heavily exploited press/media is a far more pressing matter to me than this virus, it can turn conspiracy theory into fact and truth into lies with almost no effort at all.
www.wmicentral.com
www.nationalreview.com
www.cnn.com
www.bbc.com
www.newsweek.com
www.aljazeera.com
