This will be my last post on this. Sorry so long.
Of course mistakes were made. This pandemic came out of the blue and it was the worst of all worlds from a policy standpoint. If it had been a pandemic like we had always planned for like ebola with 80-90% death rates NOBODY would complain about lock-downs, economy etc. If it had been just another typical respiratory virus that caused a common cold then we would have done very little except be mad that yet another cold was around.
This was worse. It didn't kill everyone. But, it was killing several 747s worth of people every day so was a big concern. What is the best policy? Let a bunch of people die to keep the economy better for others or try to mitigate the deaths?
Same with the medical care. We initially thought that non-invasive ventilation, something that was hardly even available when I started practice 30 years ago, would cause too much spread. Putting people on a ventillator made sense from the standpoint that it was safer for the other patients in the hospital plus these patient were arriving with oxygen levels so low that if they had any other condition they would get a ventilator. But, with time, we figured out that the spread could be controlled and for many with shockingly low oxygen, they sometimes did OK without a ventilator unlike other respiratory diseases.
Instead of that normal medical/scientific discovery being the good news that it is, the selfish hateful people of the world have to be divisive and place blame because we didn't somehow figure it out before it happened.
So, think about it from the world of emergency and ICU staff. We are asked to go to work in a very high risk environment. We spend an hour or so trying to decontaminate after work as we don't want to kill our families. In some regions and time frames, we work extreme and intense hours. In other areas and time frames, the volume of other patients drops, so we get laid off and our pay gets cut as they know there are now more people needing work (student loans make you a slave). Seeing death every day then reading all over the internet that it is "just a bad cold" is bewildering. Then a vaccine comes out and we finally feel somewhat safer.
Then after all that, we have the internet Monday morning quarterbacks saying that we were taking money, killing people, and they trust their internet gurus (many of whom now make 100x what a working doc makes) more than us. They claim we are just quacks working for big pharma.
But, of course, when they get worried for themselves personally, they show right back up at our door. Which is exactly what GGP will do the next time he is sick. And we will care for them. Because good people do good things even if it is for bad people.