Back in February 2020: “There’s no need to wear masks. Feel free to use the subway.”

Quotes might be a bit off, but Fauci’s words basically amounted to this

I’ve seen people try to write this off as “not wanting to start a panic” and “trying to secure masks for hospitals” but that’s just a copout.
If they’d initiated a lockdown sooner millions of people wouldn’t have died. They killed them on purpose because they were elderly and didn’t serve the machine. Also millions of people wouldn’t have gotten long-COVID with nearly as bad a viral load.

  • Voidance [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    It’s hard to see any kind of overall scheme with Covid other than sheer incompetence. Personally as someone that lived in a place outside the US with extremely hardcore lockdowns, - and like many others, my life suffered significantly for it - nowdays I honestly wonder what the fuck the point of it even was. The people we were trying to help despised us, Covid is here forever, and afaik countries like Sweden that basically didn’t lock down at all did not have excess deaths.

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netMEnglish
      21·
      3 months ago

      Sweden had more official COVID deaths than any other nordic country (25% higher than Finland which had second most, and over 5x Iceland which had the least). IIRC their excess deaths is even worse than that but idk.

      Also, while Sweden relied largely on softer “suggestions”, the populace was also way, way more accepting of those measures than in eg the US.

    • blight [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      3 months ago

      Yeah the fact that even if China had done perfect lockdowns and successfully contained the virus and developed 100% effective vaccines, during that entire time westerners had been breeding every virus variant imaginable and just waiting frothing at the gates to spread it to their enemies.

      :xi-plz:

    • rootsbreadandmakka [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      I don’t know where you are, but in the US lockdowns were not as they’ve been portrayed in the media. As noted in this post, the US should have locked down far earlier than they did. Instead the US only locked down when things were on the verge of collapse. And then in most places lockdowns were loose and extremely brief. Maybe in a place like New York there was something resembling a strict lockdown, but this was not the case across the country. New York’s lockdowns were pretty much lifted by the fall also, and had been gradually loosened throughout the late spring and summer anyway. I’m not sure what lockdowns looked like where you were, but lockdowns in the US were never done as they should have been if we really hoped to eradicate the virus.

      So I think wrt Sweden there’s been this false dichotomy drawn between strict lockdowns in the US, and Sweden, which didn’t lock down at all. Sweden was not some free-for-all as has often been portrayed. Schools and universities were closed for students 16 and up. And although there was not a mandate to close schools for younger kids, many schools went remote nonetheless for at least a year, which is longer than many schools in New York were remote (I’ve written before that the school I worked at was only remote for less than half a semester).

      So now of course, most in the US question the reasoning behind lockdowns while praising Sweden’s let er rip approach, however neither portrayal really gets at the reality of the situation in either country.