> Experts don’t get to make policy decisions.

And they didn't.

Sadly, policymakers in the US didn't listen to them too closely either, and prefer to use COVID as a weapon for their tribalist wars, so here we are, with over a million death.

We would have had a million deaths no matter what we did. Covid wasn’t going anywhere. The idea we could control or contain it was a fantasy.

How exceptional is the US, compared to other countries?

Many other developed nations had better outcomes with stricter measures, and here you are, arguing that it doesn't matter because, whatever?

China had the strictest of all and they still had covid spreading around. You can’t control a respiratory virus like covid no matter how much you convince yourself.

What an idiotic take.

In China, 10% of their population got COVID.

In the US, it was more than 35%.

Are you asserting we should have done what China did?

I’m just pointing out that what you just said is false.

Almost everyone will get covid, symptoms or not, especially in China after the lockdown, and especially because their vaccines weren’t very effective.

Who's were?

The COVID vaccines used in the West are very effective.

100s of thousands more died in the US because of how little we listened to experts. That's just fatalities, not other negative consequences . Our vaccination rates are abhorrent.

Even if you just look economically, the US set itself back massively with supply chain and labor issues we will be dealing with for decades because of it.

The US set itself for supply chain and labor issues for hysterically enacting crazy mandates that gave the appearance of dealing with exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of every other problem in the world. This myopic fixation on covid and only covid is what we will be dealing with for decades.

Our numbers are basically the same as any other country on earth. The truth is you can’t contain or control a highly infectious respiratory virus no matter what “The Experts” or politicians claimed. And even if we could have, that doesn’t make any of the draconian mandates okay. Even if we did absolutely nothing the numbers would have been basically the same, only we wouldn’t have destroyed our schools, government institutions, our local communities, the elderly, the or working class.

But hey, who cares about the costs of the mitigations. Only covid mattered. Worrying about anything else made you a grandma killer subject to all kinds of verbal abuse.

Worse still was the tendency of the control-measure and lockdown theatrics to later extend into a strange national version of Goodheart's law, in which the measure of cases (not deaths but just cases, even after the virus became milder) became a target and fixation for pursuing continued control measures that by almost all estimates didn't work much at all.

I can think of only one large country exception to this, which was China for a time (though their numbers can't be trusted) and at least as far as i'm concerned enacting those kinds of measures is unacceptable in any context for a virus that eventually would end up causing more or less the same mortality effects either way.

Much of the highly biased, often irrational lockdown obsession in the U.S (and other countries) was a deluded technocratic attempt to impose pseudoclinical fantasy on a reality that didn't conform.

The "interesting" part (as in, interesting to study for a psychological and social angle) was the aversion of some people to understand the situation (which was complex) and be a good player. Lots of people have a hard time to extend their view of the world, and play in their own bubble

The US was doomed due to obesity rates.