Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.

That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).

I don't understand the point you're making.

Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.

At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...

Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.

Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.

How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold?

We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases.

It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making.

Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all.

The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.

You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while wildly downplaying the severity of COVID. Every reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the perspective that it's "just a cold," but the cold does not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the time).

I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow, what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for life saving care when they could recover from sheer force of will in the privacy of their own home."

Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most populous region, and the seventh-most populous metropolitan area in North America.

We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:

"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."

https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...

Later on, we saw news reports like this one:

"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...

We should also consider the role of ventilator-associated lung injury and ventilator-induced lung injury, as well.

We also saw news reports like this:

"Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hhs-field-hospital-c...

Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.

That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19 patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients went to another one.

From my experience, people around me who got COVID suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are either lucky or your were not. :(

https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/sciencebrief/excess-mortalit...

They also advise that the actual number of deaths from covid-19 is higher than reported. Regardless, deaths were curtailed due to the measures in place. without these measures, once hospitals reach critical capacity, deaths would sky rocket, not just from covid but all sources.

> Later on, we saw news reports like this one: > "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"

This report is about two care homes in Ontario, it is not representative of the millions who died.

> We also saw news reports like this: > "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"

Tents setup on playgrounds were never the first line of defence, they were a contingency for other measures which worked. without the measures you're arguing against, those tents would have been very much used.

> Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.

You keep asserting that, I don't agree.

Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.

i’m not so sure this is because of socialized medicine considering how often american hospitals run into capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is US health care—which by the way is a significant amount the most expensive per citizen in the world.

Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).

But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.