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> Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.

I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.

It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?

The thing happened everywhere. French prime minister met with mayors and had political meetings unmasked, shaking hands and stuff, at the peek of the pandemic, got covid, then blamed his 11 yo daughter for it.

Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.

The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.

> With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying.

There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.

Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors and assumptions about how effectively community care could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6% might even be a country where the hospital system fell apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.

If the real number of cases is double that, then that would be a death rate of ... about 0.6%. And not everyone catches the disease in one pandemic wave, so the total population death rate in the US isn't going to reach that.

And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.

There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.

It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.

The hospital system literally vanishing is not really a possible failure condition. It just doesn't work like that, medical staff will always keep trying to treat whoever they can with whatever resources they have.

The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.

Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.

As long as their is oxygen support and health care people show up for work you are correct. In Mexico and other countries with less access to modern health care the death rate seems to be an order of magnitude higher. (if the CDC data is valid)

This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.

Amazingly, it's true, in countries like Mexico and the USA the death rate was an order of magnitude higher than in Australia: 0.23% and 0.27%, respectively, rather than 0.016%. But even in countries with good access to modern health care the rate was often pretty bad; Italy had 0.24%, the UK 0.23%, Spain 0.20%, and France also 0.20%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

> And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical.

No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.

If you want to see how the virus correlates with death you ought to look at rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, not wealth.

The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.

> even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes).

My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.

A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.

Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.

The argument I think was never any concrete number of deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life difficult (epidemiology can still inform political decisions).

Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.

Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.

I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.