Most people don't think COVID-19 was/is "fake" per se. Most people just think the situation was overblown.
It is a sickness most analogous to the common cold or flu. Both of which suck, both of which you SHOULD self-isolate for, although the conditions, spread and death toll is effectively the same (or lesser) than that of the cold or flu. Which no matter how you spin it, the Global restrictions were too harsh.
The majority of people believe something fake about Covid [1]. While the number of people who think it was a hoax or otherwsise completely fake is pretty low, I've seen figures that it was as high as 13% in the early pandemic, which is millions of people.
We still have people who believe in ivermectin, don't believe in vaccines and somehow still think the vaccine is more dangerous despite there being at least 7 million Covid deaths recorded and, well, 7 million fewer vaccine deaths.
The health and hospital system was in total collapse. The lockdowns helped slow the spread. Were it not for that, many more would've died. Even so, we had not enough ventilators such that doctors and nurses essentially had to choose who lived and who died. The collective trauma on healthcare workers is something we'll be dealing with for years.
What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.
Whenever someone complains about the overreacting to COVID, I recall the morgues that ran out of room so they had refrigerated shipping containers to hold bodies.
If a virus gets bad enough that the hospitals can't handle the intake and the morgues can't handle the dead, it's serious. I don't see how this is controversial.
I know it was a bad deal for kids and I'm not sure the response was perfect.
> What really scares me is how otherwise educated people can fall for the misinformation and absolutely nothing will convince them otherwise. It's basically a mind virus with no cure.
Its weird when you think about it in this way, but there's no evolutionary pressure for human beings to either become tame and servile and trusting of authority ("for their own good") or independent tinfoil-clad "freethinkers". We substituted evolutionary pressure that used to come from the environment and hardships of life for media consumption in a way that matchmaking/pair-bonding is done (for example) by what news channel you chose to follow. The search for "actual Truth" (with a big T, as in factual perception of reality) is not necessarily an evolutionary advantage. It can be an ecological hindrance. IMHO, this is downright unsettling.
At the same time, I understand how this type of mystical thinking can come from distrust in authority figures and organizations. For example, I know the approximate distance from the Earth to the moon, except I cannot ever really verify it, therefore I must source this information from third parties, such as Wikipedia. Thing is, I'm comfortable with the fact that the best answer I can give to some questions is "I don't know", but I'm pretty sure that there's no global conspiracy to hide from me the fact that the moon is actually a big piece of cheese.
It is a sickness most analogous to the common cold or flu. Both of which suck, both of which you SHOULD self-isolate for, although the conditions, spread and death toll is effectively the same (or lesser) than that of the cold or flu. Which no matter how you spin it, the Global restrictions were too harsh.