Re:Leaked docs: Ugandan gov expects Ebola will escape contro...
by VancouverMan on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @01:21PM
(#33522326)
The medical community as a whole, in numerous nations, dropped the ball quite badly over the last three years.
It was obvious by mid-2020 that this situation was severely overblown, and that pretty much every reaction was far more harmful than beneficial.
Unjustifiable and baseless paranoia caused severe inefficiencies within medical systems that are inefficient even at the best of times.
A particularly unfortunate aspect was how the wider medical community itself, including regulatory bodies, immediately and ruthlessly shut down any of the questioning and feedback from physicians, scientists, and even some politicians that would have brought light to the harmful policies much sooner.
Instead, we had to wait two years in some places for common sense to even begin to return. It should never have been like that to begin with.
Both of these factors were improvable even by small measures that don't prevent infection but just reduce the severity or probability, slowing down ("flattening the curve") the pandemic and postponing more of the cases till later when there was more capacity as well as better treatment knowledge.
As someone who suffered a lot in 2021 due to an illness that was totally unrelated to covid, but that was only so bad because of insufficient medical care available due to the pandemic (literally, some simple better care and tests earlier on would have definitely caught and resolved it, but getting care during the pandemic was a shitshow), I take this aspect quite seriously. I think covid was best understood as a crisis for the medical system than for individuals (relatively speaking)
EDIT: fwiw I'm not even disagreeing with you on anything (yes, on HN, I know), just riffing :)