This is personally offending to me, I lost two friends in their 40s in Brazil when Bolsonaro acted like Trump, and didn't implement any federal policy to lower risks during the first year of the pandemic.
Your take is stupid, that's how discourse goes now though, stupid hot takes from people who don't want to think, ponied up as some grand opinion while padded with derision and cynicism.
It's just stupid... And quite tiresome, be better.
I lost a relative because they wouldn’t let us in the hospital, waited too long to put in a stent while giving us the runaround over the phone, and caused lasting heart damage that took their life not long afterwards. We couldn’t advocate for them.
My take is not stupid. I saw the damage shutdowns caused personally. It’s offensive to me that you call my lived experience a “stupid hot take”.
Not to diminish your loss, but this whole debate is mired in the difficulty in moving from individual outcomes to aggregates that matter for public health policy. Things got ugly (and will do so again in the future) facing something novel, where many basic assumptions we have about individual results are based on other baseline assumptions that are no longer true. The very expectation of a good surgical outcome for a common stent surgery is based on statistics from "normal" times.
But, would the procedure have helped if the surgery was expected to cause COVID exposure, and the patient could have that severe respiratory illness during their surgical recovery? Would it be a good outcome if the surgical staff were dropping like flies with COVID they would get from the regular flow of patients? Alternatively, could the procedure be expected to work as reliably if the staff were wearing all that extra personal protection gear? That is not the conditions under which the procedure was developed and its benefits determined to be worth the risk...
I hope that our global experience produced enough data for someone to come up with better answers before the next novel pandemic. But, I don't know how you plow through all the inconsistencies in the data to come to any statistically valid conclusions. I.e. we have different regions/subpopulations who, in effect, ran different arms of an experiment. But, how can we compare their outcomes with sufficient rigor to find clear answers?
Which would mean if we were willing to shut things down like we did we should be willing to take the secondary effects and solve those problems too.