That's not the problem. I can't speak for the USA however this perspective is from the UK.
At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...
Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.
Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.
"At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity"
Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.
> due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care.
i’m not so sure this is because of socialized medicine considering how often american hospitals run into capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is US health care—which by the way is a significant amount the most expensive per citizen in the world.
The UK has a backlog of something like 6 million+ people waiting for operations/medical attention. Whatever issues the US has, it's not on the same scale.
Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).
How many of those patients actually needed to be at the hospital, never mind in a bed once there? How many actually needed to be transported to hospital by ambulance?
How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold?
We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases.
It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making.
Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all.
The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.
Hospitals were not taking people in willy nilly (because they were running out of beds). I wasn't in the UK, but in my area they were telling people only to come to the hospital if they were having trouble breathing. Have you ever had a cold that made it difficult for you to breathe and put you in danger of suffocating? Is that the sort of thing you just shrug off in your mind? When I was a child I had what I would consider a severe cold every year (due to a deviated septum); I coughed out some impressive phlegm gobs, but never had any shortness of breath.
You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while wildly downplaying the severity of COVID. Every reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the perspective that it's "just a cold," but the cold does not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the time).
I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow, what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for life saving care when they could recover from sheer force of will in the privacy of their own home."
You may want to reevaluate your claims, such as the mortality rate one, now that we have more information available to us.
Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most populous region, and the seventh-most populous metropolitan area in North America.
We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
> We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
> "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
They also advise that the actual number of deaths from covid-19 is higher than reported.
Regardless, deaths were curtailed due to the measures in place. without these measures, once hospitals reach critical capacity, deaths would sky rocket, not just from covid but all sources.
> Later on, we saw news reports like this one:
> "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
This report is about two care homes in Ontario, it is not representative of the millions who died.
> We also saw news reports like this:
> "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"
Tents setup on playgrounds were never the first line of defence, they were a contingency for other measures which worked. without the measures you're arguing against, those tents would have been very much used.
> Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.
In other news like in the ones from Saxony at some point there were so many deaths that the crematoriums ran too hot as they had to burn dead people non-stop.
Article just like these were the norm for some months in 2020.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/dunkle-...
That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19 patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients went to another one.
From my experience, people around me who got COVID suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are either lucky or your were not. :(
None of this moves the needle on your assertion that COVID was "just a cold" or that it was a sort of collective psychosis. You've identified measuring errors and some badly done logistics - hazards we have when considering a large scale under any circumstances - and from there you leap shear light-years to your conclusion.
No matter how the deaths were counted in the moment, excess death counts after the fact saw an increase of 12.8% during Covid in Ontario. So, unless there was another mysterious cause of death taking out around 75,000 people a year there, the mortality rate estimates pre-vaccine were pretty spot on.
At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...
Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.
Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.