[flagrant_taco]

We knew at the beginning of 2020 that the mortality rate was below 1%, we new it wasn't a new black death.

It was also quickly made taboo to say anything comparing it to a common cold. Many platforms silenced these ideas by censoring posts and shadow banning users.

There absolutely was hystaria involved but it was leaders, medical experts, and society responding irrationally based on fear. We did know it wasn't the plague, there were some in early 2020 raising valid points that it looked to have a mortality rate closer to 0.1% largely impacting the elderly and seriously ill.

How where these steps taken by governments valid, both legally and morally, when they were driven by fear and crushing individual rights?

[throw0101b]

> We knew at the beginning of 2020 that the mortality rate was below 1%, we new it wasn't a new black death.

And yet hospitals and ICUs were still packed. No one remember when Italy first got hit and the military had to be called in to remove bodybags/coffins?

* https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-italy-videos-sh...

* https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/04/coronavirus-unimag...

Even one year later morgues needed refrigerated trailers:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/bodies-stored-trailer-...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-request...

[flagrant_taco]

What happened in Italy, New York City, and others was absolutely tragic. No one should die that way and a very good argument could be made that we as society failed all of those people and their loved ones.

Death tolls in this early outbreaks did, though, show that severe illness and death was almost entirely impacting individuals with multiple comorbidities, which weights heavily towards the elderly population.

We also knew as soon as the vaccine study preprints were released that the studies were not designed to test for protecting against infection or transmission, they were only comparing symptomatic illness over roughly 30 days.

Governments coordinating censorship of any ideas that question the relative risk of the virus or the vaccine efficacy claims touted by politicians was completely unreasonable. Not only was it a massive overreach and destruction of many democratic values, it was silencing discussion of reasonable concerns given scientific information that was already available at the time (namely the population distribution of deaths and the tested hypothesis in the vaccine trials).

We were all operating at some level of fear during the pandemic, but now that we've largely moved on its time we actually take a sober look at what was known when and how the decisions made at the time actually measure up.