No. of Recommendations: 10
Ask yourself. Honestly. How much did they accomplish?
A lot. As bad as it was, a lot of people are still alive because of those measures. Compare and contrast to -I think- Sweden that didn't make a point of protecting their elder population, and had grievous losses in that demographic.
Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, with a killer contagion that was overwhelming hospitals and morgues, the obvious thing was to get people to isolate. Were the measures too much? Probably. But we didn't know that at the time, and couldn't know it. We didn't even know what was killing people for several months.
1poorlady had to do her cancer surgery on an outpatient basis because a) the hospital had no space whatsoever, and b) they didn't want her to get sick and die after the surgery. So, still groggy from anesthesia, we had to bring her home and care for her here. Non-emergent surgeries were outright canceled because of the lack of facilities to cope with the sick and dead. 1poorlady's was emergent, so they performed it.
Meanwhile, a few of my coworkers (all of them younger than me) died from COVID. My group manager spent a week on a ventilator (but survived). From what I learned, none of them took the isolation or mandates seriously prior to getting infected. The one coworker I knew personally had a wife and two kids, and was 15-20 years younger than me. Not even in the high risk group.
