alt Hacker News> COVID, I believe, had about a 1% rate, in the OG variant, and that brought the world to a standstill.
The claims that caused lockdowns were 3-10% death rate.
The world was brought to a standstill primarily due to massive fearmongering. The earliest high rates came from three things: Conflation of "infection" and "case", rationing of tests to people doctors were already pretty sure had been exposed (suppressing the denominator and inflating the rate), and biased samples (for example the Diamond Princess cruise ship was weighted towards the most susceptible population and maxed out 1.2% a month after the lockdowns had begun).
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Lockdowns were not after very very early numbers ever based on lies or fearmongering. The fatality rate we observed in the developed world was based on bad cases being able to receive prompt treatment.
Had it expanded faster it risked not only infecting a larger portion of the population pre-vaccination but also seeing more people who would have been salvageable with treatment dying innecessarily.
Pretending we could have experienced the death rate we did in our experience whilst also adopting a different strategy is farcical reasoning.
I try to keep an open mind, and this is something that you might legitimately convince me of. However:
1. A comment on this forum is not really the place to convince people of such a bold claim. It deserves at least an article/blog post, and maybe even a short book.
2. There is a large jump between the claims [the initial fatality estimate was high] and [the world was brought to a standstill due to fearmongering]. This gap is perhaps something you could address in a longer blog post
This is exactly the kind of topic that I’d love to see gwern or slatestarcodex tackle. There might be some truth to your story, but it’s a complex topic and needs a _ton_ of discussion