Why didn’t we put the world under lockdown to flatten the curve in 2017-18?
Editor's note: This is a question I keep asking, how unusual is it for a few localities in the world to have their intensive care capacities swamped with severe lower respiratory infection cases during the flu season? We are supposed to think hospitals in a few cities in the world becoming swamped in this way is highly irregular and a sign COVID-19 is a threat like no other but is that really true? Is it the case hospitals never get swamped, or is it the case the media and thus the public never before paid much attention?
One thing that is clear is that SARS-CoV-2 is a mild virus that is extremely unlikely to kill you if you become infected (see 1,2,3). Another thing which is clear is that there is no excess mortality to indicate this influenza-pneumonia-coronavirus season has been particularly bad and that SARS-CoV-2 is, therefore, killing more people than whatever coronavirus it mutated from (see 1,2). Its only remaining claim to be a greater threat than what we deal with every year without governments subjecting us to house arrest is that it has the ability to overwhelm hospitals and force doctors to ration care as is happening now in Milan and happened before in Wuhan. Well here follows a (machine-translated) report from 2018 which makes it clear the intensive care capacity of a modern European metropolis was overwhelmed just two years ago — that metropolis just happens to be Milan.
This particular swamping may not have been quite as severe, but that's not the point. The point is that if we can find a previous less severe case of swamping even for Milan itself it would indicate that globally they are not at all unusual.
Comment: As more and more mainstream publications are publishing articles questioning the mainstream narrative on the coronavirus, cracks start to appear in the manufactured consensus. How long will they be able to keep the population confined to their houses in the face of growing doubt?
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