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At this point we aren't going to get anywhere with the whole "how real" COVID was discussion, but I am here to point out that we really authentically were worried. Healthcare was about to collapse (not because this was The One pandemic but because the system has little slack). The dominos are still falling directly from COVID.
Additionally, people zigzagged between it was a far right conspiracy theory to no this is real to scary Italian estimates to bad flu and all over the place but throughout we knew that some bad shit was going down.
What we did with that information is a much more debatable thing, but I'm here to remind the conspiracy types that if nothing else the healthcare and public health people believed it was a big deal.
AIUI, this was a great concern that functionally didn't happen. Yes, most critical care units only had so many beds, and if they got a surge of people who needed ventilators it would have plausibly overwhelmed existing resources, but, again, AIUI, that pretty much didn't actually happen outside a few isolated, short-term clusters.
Maybe some of the drastic measures helped with that, but the cost was things like "grandpa dying alone in a nursing home where he caught and spread the illness, while his healthy, functionally-immune grandchildren were forbidden to visit or even attend the funeral".
So in the acute phase this is the Y2K problem - people assume it wasn't an issues because everyone was proactive and the mitigation measures were opaque. We did stuff like put dermatologists in the ICU. That's not good! It worked well enough to get people through the immediate situation.
Now we have the chronic problems. Healthcare was already having a lot of problems but COVID kickstarted or hastened a lot. An example is the death of rural hospitals. Another is the way physicians have transitioned from being practice owners to hospital employees with a decrease in level of ownership (as in responsibility). Docs jump ship out of clinical practice way faster, won't put themselves at risk anymore. You also the travel nursing thing...
It caused a lot of problems that are still unfolding.
On the patient side we are still seeing things like decreased cancer screening and increase in treatment hesitance play out.
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There's a lot of ways to seriously defend some COVID responses. I was a COVID hawk, and if not as aggressive as what coastals had to deal with, not only a hawk by Tophattington standards, and I'm still more mid-position than most here. But the trouble here is that people either need to seriously defend, or actively eject, bad actors. Fauci isn't some rando, and whether he was actively lying, rather than mistaken, is a massive deal even and especially if you want a serious public health response to ever work ever again.
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