Ok, I'm not quoting everyone but i'll make a list.
Yes, however, nearly everyone where I am refuses to wear real masks, thus someone already linked the unproven 'home made' masks
A surgical mask will help if you cough, however the people telling you to wear a mask concede that it prevents 20%, links to this one are old, but it was I believe cdc
The masks that DO help you are 35$ pre covid and are one time use/10 hours of use only whichever comes first
but all that's inside when most people I see refuse to even wear the mask properly because they are miserable to wear especially with glasses.
This would have been over sooner
In america the point of the lockdowns were to flatten the curve, it was never to stop the spread, given we were projected to have 1-2 million deaths by july, and we had 200k as of today, doing a fairly good job.
now for everyone not in america, I know your news is even more skued than it is in america, so i will give a small rundown off the top of my head
before this ever went public/became part of public knowledge, america offered help to china on the new potential thread, they refused
early january, president stopped travel from china, the democrats called it racist and tried to block it
in the beginning when shit was starting to get real, the president advised to say inside, new york and california I believe told everyone 'eff trump, go out and party', there were likely more then just these two, but due to the massive cities, these were the most damning ones.
every single step of the way where a treatment was found and the president would tell people progress or in the case of france finding out malaria drugs helped, every single news outlet and the opposing party shit on it or out right tells you to do the opposite.
In the early days, a few governors had covid patients shipped to retirement homes... this is where 50k of our death toll (from when it was 150k) comes from.
Another thing, an attack vector that people like to point out, the president did not defund task forces for pandemics, what he wanted to do if I remember correctly, was remove the group that came up with the protocols for what to do, because their job was done but they were still around. but because media cant let a good or even neutral articles be made, they have to sku the truth... lies by omission.
In 100% honesty, there was no better person to put in charge because both sides were unprepared
This would have been over sooner
part 2
now, we are going into a bit of politics here and 'conspiracy theory'
from day one the democrats hated trump, and from year one many were wishing for a recession. My understanding is pre pandemic, the economy was doing better then ever, but there was an undercurrent that a recession was going to happen, but every few weeks you would find a democrat wishing for or saying a recession was coming trying to provoke a market response to damage the economy because till covid that's the only vector they had to really get at the president.
covid happens, and mostly liberal places royally screw up, they blame the president. but they are given almost free reign in how they handle the situation. This is both good and bad, good in the way that the president did not power grab during a crisis like every other president would have but bad in the way that they allowed a prepertral lockdown of democrat areas. Notice a small mom and pop store that has fewer people going into it would spread the virus less then lets say a walmart, but for some reason walmart is allowed to have the whole store open...
So a recession was forced.
Now keep in mind, we were only trying to flatten the curve so hospitals were not overwhelmed... there were several nurses and possibly a few doctors (this is from a long time ago cant remember if it was just nurses) who got fired for even suggesting their hospital wasn't over run. the only message you could put out was 'oh we effed'. I'm not denying some of the worst areas are in a bad situation, but its FAR from what we were told, weather this is down to early numbers being heavily skewed (they were) or if this is down to the lockdowns were effective, who knows. but we do have the freedom of information act, and at least one area that wouldn't tell the numbers, and shut every bar down had the numbers leak, the every business down when there were only 90 total cases linked to them... over the next few years, we are going to find out how much we really needed to lock down, and i'm making a prediction now, democratic areas were far to overzealous in their lockdowns for some reason... see the first section of part 2 for why.
Cases in general as they relate to america
Ok, in america we have a 15-17000$ grant for each case of covid that comes in that results in a death, this has seen people in motorcycle accidents who had covid marked as a covid death, so the number is a bit skewed.
with this in mind the cdc did a study to find out more about covid deaths, and found that only 7% of the deaths were solely covid, putting the total death toll below .05% or 1 in 5000 for healthy people, and this number is going down as we find out how many people were actually asymptomatic and how many people just had cold like symptoms and thought nothing of it.
our covid cases going up is generally do to testing being wider spread, not so much a failure of containment, and this is something we were never attempting to do in the first place
we were never trying to contain it as it would never work
we were never meant to be shut down this long regardless of cases
we tried to stop the spread from coming in as best as possible, but realistically, it was too late as it was already here in the december area
I will agree its not perfect, but it 100% became political and that more or less makes no one take it seriously
Politicians are not abiding by the rules they set in place, mostly on the democrat side, which also makes people see how seriously people are taking it.
I can't say we did good or bad, given we were projected 1-2 million deaths early on and we are at 200k FAR further down the road then they thought.
I think the better road we could have taken was have old and severely unhealthy people quarantine as they are more likely to bite it, and when I say old, I mean nearing average life expectancy.
we could have opened up sooner, we could open up more things, and given how little masks help, we could make those tasks/activities not miserable.
I agree with masks when you obviously have symptoms or you have a bad cough... but the incubation time more or less forces everyone, healthy or not, to forever wear a mask, and this may be me being callous seeing that I already had it and was asymptomatic while also having several of the modifiers that make death more likely, im not willing to live my life with a mask permanently attached to me and eye protection (yes this was a thing that was suggested a few months back, but due to near universal reluctance to do that, was never brought further then a talking point)
Now, this was long, and anything more from this will likely fall into politics far more than I would want to go on a manga site as I already left some things off due to the political nature of any conversation going forward with it and focused it as much as I could on the virus and the response to it.
I hope this gives some people outside america a bit of a different view knowing you are more or less lied to more than us about our country in the news.