Canada

At the beginning of the pandemic someone very correctly predicted that America was going to do the plague the same way we did Vietnam: enthusiastically for a little bit, then once we realize how expensive it is we were gonna give up, run away and loudly declare victory.

You have said it very well.

In Australia even our absolute harshest lockdowns made allowances for millions of "essential" industries.

Unless you owned a business installing styrofoam nuns, you kept going to work in some capacity.

We're an island for fuck's sake! We could have stopped this thing in it's tracks. But no, the flights must keep arriving. Business must business.

Everything is beyond fucked man, I know, you're probably preaching to the choir. Theres no reload, no save, no do over. Find happiness the best you can and pray you die before we turn from sideways to upside down.

That's my plan at least.

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world.

Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn't have stopped it anywhere else.

Now, what I do agree with is that the response could've been a lot better, and many lives would've been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it's a crime of unprecedented scale.

Yes it did. If all countries did this around the world many people would have starved to death. It's simply not ethical. Without eliminating it everywhere it would spread eventually - just look at Australia.

You can't even enforce a total lockdown in western countries without excluding "key workers" that would allow the virus to spread anyway.

Nothing you have suggested would work in the real world. The only solution to prevent this is new medicines and prophylactics. We have developed some of these in the form of antivirals but they are not used enough to stop the spread.

We already enjoy a level of health unknown to people 100 years ago even with COVID-19. There will always be new diseases and this is the nature of evolution unfortunately. Previous generations had to accept this, now we have to as well. I hate to say it but probably our current level of health and healthcare isn't sustainable without further advances thanks to antibiotic and antiviral resistance. We will need to change our approach going forward using things like bacteriophages, increased sanitation, healthier life styles, less cattle antibiotics, and new treatments to keep up.

the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it

When I ask actual doctors, they disagree. Then we laugh about how anti-vax karen-convoy it sounds.