before the virus mutated to a less-lethal form and/or we started naturally gaining herd immunity by being exposed to weakened/dead virus from other people who had started recovering. It actually was a lot more dangerous then.
That's blatantly wrong, sorry. In fact, Pepperidge Farm members back in early April when everyone was claiming NY's problems were because it got hit by a more dangerous strain. But, looking at the world as a whole, the virus had much lower death rates than predicted pretty much everywhere. I've no interest in quibbling over what the actual number on the death rate is, how it compares to flu, and so on, but the simple fact is that this virus was nowhere near as deadly as people had claimed for the populace as a whole.
Now, I'm willing to cut Fauci some slack on the initial lockdown recommendations because everyone thought it was going to be doom. But that slack ends in early/mid April because it was becoming apparent then that this was not that bad.
Things that happened in mid-April:
We had a month of data from states that didn't lock down showing that they weren't getting hit bad
We had a month of data showing quite clearly that the infection is very opportunistic about who it kills.
The first large-scale antibody tests started coming out showing that the infection was much more widespread (and thus death rates were much less) than thought.
States started reporting suspected deaths in addition to actual deaths, thereby inflating the death numbers.
That's blatantly wrong, sorry. In fact, Pepperidge Farm members back in early April when everyone was claiming NY's problems were because it got hit by a more dangerous strain. But, looking at the world as a whole, the virus had much lower death rates than predicted pretty much everywhere. I've no interest in quibbling over what the actual number on the death rate is, how it compares to flu, and so on, but the simple fact is that this virus was nowhere near as deadly as people had claimed for the populace as a whole.
Now, I'm willing to cut Fauci some slack on the initial lockdown recommendations because everyone thought it was going to be doom. But that slack ends in early/mid April because it was becoming apparent then that this was not that bad.
Things that happened in mid-April:
We had a month of data from states that didn't lock down showing that they weren't getting hit bad
We had a month of data showing quite clearly that the infection is very opportunistic about who it kills.
The first large-scale antibody tests started coming out showing that the infection was much more widespread (and thus death rates were much less) than thought.
States started reporting suspected deaths in addition to actual deaths, thereby inflating the death numbers.