> If it isn’t severe, then why bother protecting yourself at all? (Leave it to those that want to, or need to, to protect themselves.)
It was a severe disease for a certain portion of the population, especially before the vaccine.
If you're willing to write off anyone with any preexisting condition and with older than a certain age, or just have them not participating in society for a few years, that's one kind of tradeoff. Everyone taking extra precautions like wearing masks and trying to socially distance is a different tradeoff.
There's no getting around the fact that given a novel risk, we as a society had to make tough choices and tradeoffs over how to deal with it. There was no way to get out of this with zero negative impact - because the world gave us a bad situation.
Revisionism these days seems to accept that we didn't get it right, but rhetorically asks "could you have done better?", and gives only a shrug.
We should have done better, and we could have.
We put those with preexisting conditions and those over a certain age at greater risk by pretending our protection measures were good enough when they really weren't.
It was a severe disease for a certain portion of the population, especially before the vaccine.
If you're willing to write off anyone with any preexisting condition and with older than a certain age, or just have them not participating in society for a few years, that's one kind of tradeoff. Everyone taking extra precautions like wearing masks and trying to socially distance is a different tradeoff.
There's no getting around the fact that given a novel risk, we as a society had to make tough choices and tradeoffs over how to deal with it. There was no way to get out of this with zero negative impact - because the world gave us a bad situation.