While I think that supply chains are pretty resilient... were we watching the same thing?

We had a mild disease making rounds - far less serious than some of the pandemics of the early 20th century, let alone before that - and we had multi-week shortages of TP, followed by multi-year shortages of ICs and cars.

Yeah, no one died due to not being able to buy TP, but it wasn't all that confidence-inspiring. Pre-COVID, would you have thought that the supply of such a basic and easily-manufactured good is so weirdly inflexible?

Most, possibly all of that, was due to the mass lockdowns - something we'd never attempted before even in the face of much worse pandemics.

because COVID was no more severe than flu, not airborne Ebola that everyone at the time pretended it was.

said no one who worked in hospitals in 2020 and 2021

Not sure I'll ever get over it

what has changed since 2020 and 2021, exactly? there's no cure, there is no permanent vaccine, and I doubt that even twitter neurotics who had two syringes in their handles when COVID was le current thing bother getting their bi-weekly booster, which means virtually all of us are unvaccinated again.

and yet the world keeps spinning. does that not suggest that the detractors were right all along?

we got a new current thing for the media and twitter checkmarks to yell about, and COVID quickly ceased to be a problem - less than three months after "winter of severe illness and death" promised by the white house in december 2021.

You might want to check the CDC website about excess WEEKLY deaths during COVID. That was WITH all of the extra precautions, lock downs, etc. I haven’t seen a flu season that looked like that.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

See also the Howtown video "How do they count Covid deaths?":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2rCjvjYLU

> what has changed since 2020 and 2021, exactly

For starters, the virus itself has changed.