I'm not saying it doesn't exist - one of my wife's friends from high school died of it. What I am saying is that hospitals are businesses and I get nervous when I see Banner Health quoted in many of the articles about our rising Covid rate. They are doing a balancing act and I believe they would advocate for certain public policy moves based on the bottom line as much as any concern for my safety.
And I hope I'm not being taken as a "mask shamer." My issue with this whole thing has been the intellectual dishonesty of the lock up - don't tell me it's two weeks or two months when what you've always meant was two years.
The only figures I personally look at are those provided by death certificates, public health departments and their aggregate presentation at the CDC. While some states are known to be falsifying or suppressing their numbers, the death certificates, signed by actual doctors, are pretty accurate.
There is no huge conspiracy of primary care doctors, infectious disease specialists, ER doctors, etc. These people are dying in order to treat the sick, they are not lying on death certificates or hospital charts.
Just ignore hospital statements (I never see them). Find a different way of getting information about CoVid, one that you can trust. BTW, the NYTimes has been completely reliable in importing real stats from sources that have been vetted thoroughly and are rooted in death certificates and hospital charts.
You seem to be missing the point of the "lock up" - and the fact that the decisions about that were made by politicians, not scientists and doctors, who - had they been allowed - would have given a very different plan and reasons for the plan.
I guess the public might have ignored them anyway. But the fact that doctors in NY literally had to allow people to die in the ER - in large numbers - due to the physical impossibility of treating them promptly - was our first priority.
We cannot stay "locked down" forever. But if older people didn't realize, early on (by mid-February or at least early March) that this was going to be a "rest of our lives" kind of thing, I don't know what to say. It was very clear that the US (and many other larger nations) were not going to be South Korea or New Zealand.
But we could have been Australia or even Vietnam - and if not those places, we could have at least been Italy or France.
Had we persisted in a real lockdown (we never have had a real lockdown in the US, not at all), and invested in known methods of contact tracing (we employ NONE of the known working methods nationwide) we would have a very different situation right now and I could at least think about maybe, someday, leaving my house.
As it stands, although I am not that old, I may never travel again, never go to a restaurant again, and my life expectancy is predicted to be 8 years shorter than it was predicted to be on Dec 31, 2019. For men, it's 9 years less (and it was already shorter for men my age than women). I was predicted to live to be around 80, now I get to look forward to dying in 7 years.
All of this is very hard to take in, especially as it would have been preventable if the agencies at the federal level knew anything at all about pandemics and had acted. We still aren't doing quarantining of incoming airline passengers, not the way it's done in the places where CoVid is under control.
Americans are now confined to their own borders, except for a handful who can afford the very expensive flights to the few places still permitting us to visit. Look for some nations to try and evict American businesses and/or military if we continue on the course we're on (endemic, devastating viral disease that no one else wants to have pop up again in their nation, as they - unlike us - pull it under control).
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