[notjes]

Our governments should have done nothing. People, doctors and clinics would have taken care of this easily. Also, it would be a good community building exercise. But no. Once the Governments stepped in, it was all lockdowns, prohibition and ban of repurpose drugs, soldiers marching through streets, 80 years of ethics preaching tossed out the window in a heart beat.

[arsome]

While I do feel the restrictions have been widely overzealous, to say "People, doctors and clinics would have taken care of this easily." is an absolute falsehood. The failure of the healthcare system to keep up in many places is what caused many restrictions to become a necessity in the first place.

[native_samples]

Sorry, but what healthcare system has even tried to keep up? Instead of adding capacity and implementing targeted, fast training programmes they have been firing healthcare workers, and letting the rest get burned out. In most areas of life companies that suddenly face a surge in demand would come up with dozens of creative ways of meeting that demand - instead, governments enforced lockdowns which pushed hospitals deep into the red.

Just today there is a story about how the NHS in the UK bought all the private sector health care capacity at the start of the pandemic, and then didn't actually use any of it!

https://unherd.com/thepost/the-nhs-covid-beds-that-were-neve...

In neighbouring Switzerland the healthcare system did in fact add lots of emergency ICU capacity in March 2020. They spent the next 1.5 years getting rid of it again because it wasn't necessary. Look at their dashboard to see this.

Healthcare management is the failure nobody dare name in all this. They've had 18 months to find ways to add capacity, for a disease with no cure and that doesn't even require surgery. Instead they expect all of society to become slaves to the god of hospital beds.

[martneumann]

It's not the government who cried for help because of overflowing ICUs, it was the hospitals.