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.
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.