I think government did cause a lot of this, but it would not have happened without the media creating a narrative of fear and many, if not most, people buying into it.
The media, for reasons of politics and ratings, fanned the flames of this “pandemic” with few expressing any skepticism.
We KNEW back in April of last year who was at risk and who had very little risk from this virus, but that knowledge changed nothing about the response.
The contrast of two towns only minutes away from one another and the “results” is starkly tragic.
I am also resentful that barely anyone mentions the role of China in this mess.
I feel the same way. I had no problem with being careful in February and March, but when April rolled around, it was clear to me the virus was understood pretty well.
Perhaps not enough to develop a vaccine, but clinically, how it spread and how it affected people.
In early April, it did dawn on me that this whole reaction was, if not totally contrived, unnecessarily overblown.
Since then, I have absolutely discarded the “unnecessarily overblown”. It was a malignant, active intervention at many governmental levels up to the Presidency.
When Trump began calling for things to open up and was uniformly attacked, that was when I knew.
They didn’t lock down like this when the same London imperial model predicted 150 million dead of bird flu in 2005.
Bird flu pandemic ‘could kill 150m’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/30/birdflu.jamessturcke