We now know that, by far, the overwhelming majority of folks that needed medical treatment and/or died from covid had existing health - specifically respiratory - conditions that made them far more likely to succumb to the virus. The rest were elderly and at risk of all sorts of virus related deaths, including the common cold and flu.
We panicked, and overreacted as a society, and made an awful lot of mistakes and bad decisions. In the process we crushed a lot of people and children unnecessarily.
There's an entire generation of kids that are simply broken for life now. We just swept them into the next grade level and said "they'll make it up, don't worry"... except they are not making it up. There's a lot more to childhood than reading text books and solving multiplication problems - we robbed all of that for literally no good reason.
There's a lot of lessons to learn from the pandemic. Can we pass the final exam though? I think probably not...
Citation needed. How can you be sure of a broad conclusion like this?
Additionally, the "flatten the curve" efforts were based on falsehoods issued by NIH and CDC, such as cloth masks preventing transmission. If there was going to be an overrun of the hospital system, it would have occurred during the time the public was being mislead about prevention techniques. It didn't...
It seems the forced termination of a significant portion of hospital staff would have had the greatest impact on overloading the system - yet even that didn't matter.
So, flipped on it's head - I think a citation is required when we argue these efforts prevented an overloaded system.
Lockdowns were almost universal, and also happened in countries where the healthcare systems are robust.
Healthcare systems are statistical mechanisms. They can't treat abnormal amounts of people at once. And no, we can't overbuild them to cover extreme contingency, it's not economically viable.
It's the same thing as with bank runs or your ISP's network bandwidth.