You don't get to point at perverse bureaucratic incentives years later, in another country even, as validation for general pandemic denial.
In the US, stay at home suggestions are over. Industry shutdowns are over. Mask mandates are over. They've been over for a long time. The scaremongering of "what if these temporary conditions become permanent" has now been demonstrated as fallacious. Our society has basically made it through, thanks to the natural evolution of the virus combined with the technology of vaccine development (plus a lot of people who aren't with us any more). Go watch a World Cup game at a bar, lick a subway pole, move on to another simulation of protest - whatever you want.
Bureaucratically, local healthcare systems seem to still have mask requirements, Covid testing policies, the Doctor Who -esque custom of squirting goop on your hand as a greeting, etc. Will these ever disappear? Mask requirements might even make sense independent of Covid, given that most healthcare settings are high concentrations of people with half of them sick and the other half immunocompromised. But in general, all of these latent results are certainly not more of a problem than the longstanding administrative bureaucracy that grinds doctors and nurses into overworked dust. (I say this even taking into account the effect of masks on the hearing impaired, which needs to be addressed).
People in positions of power will always act for their own selfish interests - one of the very first things the federal government did was give away six trillion dollars to prevent the stonk market from reflecting reality. But that everpresent banal observation doesn't invalidate that there was also a legitimate response to a real problem. We can debate how effective facets of the response are, the accountability of our leaders, etc, but implying that the whole "narrative" is primarily bureaucratic self interest is just nonsense.
In the US, stay at home suggestions are over. Industry shutdowns are over. Mask mandates are over. They've been over for a long time. The scaremongering of "what if these temporary conditions become permanent" has now been demonstrated as fallacious. Our society has basically made it through, thanks to the natural evolution of the virus combined with the technology of vaccine development (plus a lot of people who aren't with us any more). Go watch a World Cup game at a bar, lick a subway pole, move on to another simulation of protest - whatever you want.
Bureaucratically, local healthcare systems seem to still have mask requirements, Covid testing policies, the Doctor Who -esque custom of squirting goop on your hand as a greeting, etc. Will these ever disappear? Mask requirements might even make sense independent of Covid, given that most healthcare settings are high concentrations of people with half of them sick and the other half immunocompromised. But in general, all of these latent results are certainly not more of a problem than the longstanding administrative bureaucracy that grinds doctors and nurses into overworked dust. (I say this even taking into account the effect of masks on the hearing impaired, which needs to be addressed).
People in positions of power will always act for their own selfish interests - one of the very first things the federal government did was give away six trillion dollars to prevent the stonk market from reflecting reality. But that everpresent banal observation doesn't invalidate that there was also a legitimate response to a real problem. We can debate how effective facets of the response are, the accountability of our leaders, etc, but implying that the whole "narrative" is primarily bureaucratic self interest is just nonsense.