Lockdowns are called for because hospitals risk being overwhelmed:
https://nypost.com/2020/11/11/hospitals-at-capacity-in-parts-of-wisconsin-amid-covid-19-spike/
US Population in 1975 -- 219 million
US Population in 2018 -- 327 million
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2018/
US Hospital Beds in 1975 -- 1,465,828
US Hospital Beds in 2018 -- 924,107
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hospital-beds-in-the-us-since-2001/
Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP expenditures for healthcare as percent of total healthcare spending in 1975 -- 22%
Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP expenditures for healthcare as percent of total healthcare spending in 2018 -- 37%
Ultimately, the Covid-19 crisis was brought about by medicine becoming more concerned with billing than with health, but that is a qualitative question that this quantitative analysis merely helps to illustrate.
I've been wondering if it's a ruse to hide the collapse of health systems round the world.
The covid has shown us the limits of modern medicine in defeating age and general bad health. The obesity epidemic, and its accompanying syndromes of diabetes, high blood pressure, and physical inactivity, is what has allowed covid to kill so many people under 75. Those it killed who were over 75 had little to live for. Dr. Emmanuel was right when he wrote the article for the Atlantic criticizing end of life care for the elderly. I would rather be dead than live in a nursing home. If I can't take a shit for myself, put me out of my misery. But that sort of mentality would devastate the medical business, which depends on each one of us racking up huge bills on the last few months of our inevitable journey to death.
Good health is more than just an absence of disease.
What is particularly troubling is the prospect of medical tyranny. I remember a case in Connecticut of a teenage girl, Justina Pelletier, whose family lost custody and control of her care because they disagreed with her doctors. A jury absolved the hospital of medical malpractice. I say you are a fool if you take your child to Boston Children's Hospital.
https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/02/20/justina-pelletier-trial-boston-childrens-hospital/
We are all Justina Pelletier now, forced to suffer under a medical regime of dubious merit. The Swedes got it right in keeping society open, and now they have a low death rate even as cases increase.
I have come across too many incompetent doctors to have faith in the profession as a whole. Remember when systemic racism was dubbed a "medical crisis" by medical leaders? I want a second opinion, the right to choose my own doctor, and the right to refuse treatment.
What is the first thing a medical office wants to know? It is not what is wrong with you, but what your medical insurance is. The business part of medicine has superceded the medical part.
Look at medical marijuana. A devil's deal was done between pot activists and doctors to legitimize marijuana. Marijuana prescriptions are a rubber-stamped joke that let doctors get their piece of the pie and keep prices inflated. The opioid epidemic is all Big Pharma's doing.
Now we should trust Big Medicine to allow our most basic liberties of free movement and assembly to be indefinitely suspended because their incompetence has been revealed by mother nature.
Thanks for letting me get it all off my chest.