> weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax

Have you treated many patients with COVID? I’ve heard the opposite of your claim from those who have.

People with first hand experience offering counterpoints like Dr Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi did but unfortunately their videos explaining their side of the story were conveniently removed from places your YouTube -- while conveniently leaving the videos remaining to hear the kind of stories you heard.

Step back a moment and ask yourself,

“How exactly would Dr Dan Erickson know if someone else’s patient said this?”

There was massive regional differences in how different parts of the country and even different parts of the same state responded to COVID.

The issue was their extrapolation of their local keyhole perception to the entire country.

Flawed in many ways: https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19-alert/covid-19-articles...

Was this a yes or a no?

As the husband at the time of a military critical care nurse who worked local ED in a major US city and deployed to New York -- yes, there were absolutely people who denied they had COVID even as they were being intubated.

Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.

Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.

> People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax

There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.

Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).

Nobody (OK, maybe a few very special people) is saying that COVID was a hoax. What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.

Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?

> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.

But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".

I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...

>Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...

I'd say that's still a good thing. Surfaces can get so dirty, so I'm glad COVID made people more aware of properly clearning their surfaces.

>how come Africa didn't die out?

Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.

>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?

Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.

>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?

I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.

Any other questions?

many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.

one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.

sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.

Same here. The extreme politicization of the disease, plus the social isolation, plus over reliance on inflammatory social media as one's only channel to the outside world, fully broke some people's grip on reality. Permanently for some.