The issues you are describing is more the problem that health officials shift the burden of proof depending which assumptions or policies they want to make. Any facts that counter their policies have to be proven by significant evidence. And they often wouldn't look too hard. A fact that supports their conclusion can be assumed until proven otherwise.
It was called a novel virus to indicate that no person already had (acquired) immunity against it. What inference you make from the word "novel" is on you, not on the rest of the world.
So this isn't crazy; it literally happens to many respiratory viruses. Viruses mutate
Why did we decide to throw out everything we knew about viruses for SARS-CoV-2? It's like society discovered "OMG I could catch a virus and die!". Not realizing that virtually nothing was new about SARS-CoV-2. It's just a respiratory virus like any other we've had passed through millions of generations of living beings. Oddly enough the "broader human species" managed to survive and thrive through all of them.
I don't remember anyone ever doing that. I remember them calling it a novel coronavirus, because it is a new coronavirus, at least to us.
Same goes for the T-cell immunity really: it was pretty much a given that the body's normal immune processes still applied to coronavirus, but what was novel was the unscientific community insisting that they couldn't possibly be reinfected and a course of vaccines couldn't possibly give them any benefit to their immune system after they'd been infected (someone should tell all the old people who get flu shots every year!)
What we call the flu is not a single virus that comes once a year. It's different types of virusses each time, and the flu vaccine targets the most likely candidates of that year. So no, you don't generally get REinfected with the flu, because it's a different virus. Some of the virusses that we consider 'the flu' are actually corona virusses, and perhaps covid19 will join that list as it becomes endemic.
There are four other endemic human coronaviruses which typically cause common cold symptoms. Those symptoms are clinically distinct from the flu in most cases.
What medical practitioners call the flu is a small subset of influenza viruses common in humans, each with a high potential for reinfection, including reinfections within a year (as well as constantly evolving variant strains, just like COVID)
what leadership needed to do was identify the dynamic threat--mainly to the elderly & immune deficient--and mitigate for them, not run around screaming like discombobulated chickens promoting throw-everything-against-the-wall safetyism. we could have had highly targeted mitigations and minimal disruption to our lives; instead, we got incessant debates over useless masking, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates.
even including the elderly and immune deficient, over 99% of people get covid and recover just fine. this isn't the black plague by any stretch of the imagination.
No, this one killed more people than anything in US history, more than wars, prior pan-/epidemics, etc. In my lifetime, no 'new virus' has had any sort of similar effect at all, by orders of magnitude.
we don't know yet what steady-state looks like, but note that medical/epidemiological organizations don't generally keep death statistics on colds (caused by rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, etc.) because they're not a significant number. colds can be a contributing factor in death for folks with deficient immune systems, just as it is with covid, but is generally not the sole cause.
again, >99% survive covid just fine. for people with multiple co-morbidities, it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).
That's not a good survival rate, though the number sounds big.
> it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).
The people at risk are not nearly all "teetering on the brink", nor have they died at this astounding rate from other causes. We could save their lives.
People are dying; and we can save them, and we could have saved many more. Blood is on the hands of the those who stood in the way.
It was and still is completely crazy.