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Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

> Damage from all the lockdowns was devastating.

I firmly remember all the army trucks sprinting around my home city carting dead bodies and healthcare professionals, and the local government commandeering the local ice rink to serve as a makeshift morgue to handle the huge volume of COVID deaths that all the morgues and armed forces makeshift equipment were no longer able to handle.

I also remember that only the lockdowns were effective in reigning in transmission rates, hospital admission rates, and more importantly death rates.

I feel your personal take is ignorant and uninformed. I'm sorry your life fell apart during the past year, but the things you're choosing to pin the blame on are the things that saved millions from their deathbeds in understaffed hospitals from a disease with no treatment or cure.

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>I firmly remember all the army trucks sprinting around my home city carting dead bodies and healthcare professionals,

I also remember many media outlets using extremely emotionally appealing images of "scary" hospital scenes and the like (I assume, to prey on our fears and insecurities to drive clicks and ad revenue). I also remember a picture of a pauper's graveyard being used as a image of how "horrifying" the Covid death rate was, and other visceral but misleading stories.

How many people actually died of Covid in your home town?

> I also remember many media outlets using extremely emotionally appealing images of "scary" hospital scenes and the like.

I don't know under which rock you lived, but in my home town the armed forces had to commandeer hotels and an expo hall to have enough beds to accommodate all the critical COVID patients.

Do you believe health services didn't struggled to handle the massive inflow of COVID cases?

> I also remember a picture of a pauper's graveyard being used as a image of how "horrifying" the Covid death rate was, and other visceral but misleading stories.

You ignore what you wish to ignore. Commandeering ice rinks to serve as makeshift morgues and local morgues having to work around the clock with piles of caskets and body bags piled up in freezers to handle all the dead was something that affected only the poor?

I heard you. I prefer to work with hard facts, and not emotionally-laden scenes and imagery. What was the Covid death rate for your town?

Our city council commandeered a football stadium as an emergency Covid field hospital. It was practically unused.

>Do you believe health services didn't struggled to handle the massive inflow of COVID cases?

The data for the UK health service shows that, overall, hospital capacity was at around 70% for the duration of the pandemic.

>was something that affected only the poor?

You missed my point. The image used showed cheap caskets piled up, in they way that they are in the normal operation of a pauper's graveyard, and may have even been taken before Covid. The point was that the imagery was used for its emotional response, with no context given.

My city turned our event center into a COVID treatment facility (warehouse-scale) but it never got used. Kind of wish they had- in retrospect, having large numbers of people sick with COVID congregating in hospitals with people who weren't sick with COVID was probably not the best strategy.

Here in the UK, we effectively turned our nursing homes into COVID treatment facilities. Thanks to the global fear of Covid, we decided that the best strategy was to empty the hospitals (discharging many old folks back to their care homes in the process), in preparation for a huge wave of the young and old, all in a critical state with Covid.

That didn't happen, but what did happen is that all the old folks gave each other Covid and died anyway.

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