It wasn't inevitable, Americans chose per usual to do something half-ass, which generally is worse than doing nothing at all or full-assing it

In my state, it was as full-assed as it could be without societal collapse, and didn’t work.

How do/did you know it's "inevitable"?

I didn't have Covid yet. At least as far as I know. I work in health IT and have been vaccinating and protecting myself according to the book. It works.

Respectfully, how do you know you didn't have it? If you are young and vaccinated, the chances of your covid being asymptomatic would be quite high.

As I said: "as far as I know". We have to follow a tight testing routine. The remaining chances are quite low.

Good for you, you are in a situation where you are not reliant on a small business and it’s easy to follow advisories.

There’s far more to life and jobs than that.

As for how it’s inevitable - maybe it wasn’t, but look around you. An awful lot of destruction we did for questionable benefits.

And I know that with the next pandemic, far less people are going to listen. To them, the credibility of experts has been permanently damaged.

Maybe the government should have paid people so they could stay home? But that's communism and then no one will work and who will bring us our McDonald's order during the outbreak

You seem to not comprehend how completely unworkable such a solution is for a country as broad as the US.

Also, we did try, it was called Payroll Protection and it was an epic fail.

We paid 2k$ a month for people to stay at home in Canada and it was quite an issue with low income jobs.

They did.

How do you measure "questionable benefits"? As a Government you have to protect every single citizen. Lifes have been saved because of lockdowns, vaccination, masks, etc. Not doing that and letting everybody get Covid to see who survives is barbaric. I know that it's no seen that way in the US since this has been your culture but you should accept that it's not seen that way in civilized countries.

Lives have also been lost because of lockdowns, vaccination, masks, etc. Pretending that lockdowns have no collateral damage upon families, businesses, education, and so on is barbaric. And pretending that people aren't allowed to weigh the pros and cons of these actions without being called names is also not the hallmark of a civilized country.

What is your point? Would you have wanted EVEN MORE dead people?

Nobody is pretending that lockdown hurt people. This is a strawman.

*Nobody is pretending that lockdown DIDN'T hurt people.

What "works?" Statistics? You can do everything wrong and still not get covid. About 10% of the population has gotten covid reach year (at least in USA) sure that probably goes up if you don't follow all those protocols. But even if you don't, there is still a good chance you didn't get it. Here, have my tiger repellant rock.