I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.
I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.
On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.
You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").
Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.
You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.
Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.
The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.