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by thu2111 2106 days ago
Spain had similar problems to Italy early on in the outbreak where they shut down large chunks of hospital capacity by insisting doctors and nurses self-isolated, although it's now known that this was actively harmful: the virus is virulent and would have infected them sooner or later anyway, and the ones who weren't already elderly or sick wouldn't have been badly affected.

It's a debatable question whether this shutdown of hospitals was due to the virus, or due to the over-reaction to it. Other places where the virus started later didn't do this to the same extent (although the UK did and is still doing so!), and they saw less serious problems.

As for "many bodies of people dead at home/on the streets", can you show me reports of people dropping dead of COVID on the streets? I never heard that, it seems it hasn't happened elsewhere and sounds suspect.

Remember that basically all reports about people dying "of" COVID are garbage. The average age of death when testing positive is over the average life expectancy in most places (maybe all, I haven't checked). Almost all such reports are of deaths that were naturally happening anyway due to age or other serious health conditions, and COVID was just co-present at time of death - maybe it pushed them over by a little bit, but probably only by months. Correlation/causation mixups are a huge problem with COVID datasets.