[benjaminwootton]

Agreed. It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, and that at best the restrictions could just kick the can down the road a while. It was also covered up by printing cash at enormous scale.

Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.

It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.

[22SAS]

They should blame Xi. All these economic decisions wouldn't have happened had there been no COVID. The Chinese government deliberately released this lab-made bioweapon/virus, to see how it would negatively impact most of the world. From economies struggling, to people getting polarized and more divided, and supply chains getting affected, their move has been a massive intelligence success for them.

If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.

[jryhjythtr]

About the only upside is that China seems to have taken a big dose of their own poison.

[jryhjythtr]

It'll be like the wars in Iraq and Libya. Vitally important at the time, but you can't find anyone now who will say they supported them.

Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.

[okaram]

It wasn't blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, especially because it wasn't.

There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?) think doing nothing would have been much worse.

[implements]

> It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease,

That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.

[jryhjythtr]

Three huge assumptions here -

"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.

"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.

"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.

[benjaminwootton]

3 weeks for me to get a remote GP appointment right now. This will be killing more people than Covid ever did, so we are in the red before we even get onto anything else.