In the early stages, nobody really knew what we were dealing with. This extended into April 2020. China put out nonstop lies to counter the trickle of facts leaking out about COVID-19. WHO was not the least bit helpful. CDC didn’t have a clue. We heard China claiming it’s no big deal, no need to worry, we have it contained, it’s a really minor illness, etc. Then in February and into March we saw it slam parts of Italy to the point that people were literally dying in the hallways of the hospitals and patients were being given triage care in parking lots and on steps. Doctors were literally committing suicide from the stressful, overworked, and frankly terrifying conditions present.
Then it hit here. It was obvious that China had lied, and it was obvious that we didn’t want to end up like Italy. I don’t think front-line medical personnel got the kind of help they needed to actually be a voice of reason in all this. I think the reactions from the state and local politicians drove panic and infection rates through the roof. I think governors like Cuomo and Newsom drove up the death numbers by forcing nursing homes to accept known infected patients, which in some cases wiped out large parts of the nursing homes’ populations.
In the conditions created by China’s lies and the state and local politicians, it was a bloodbath, and I can’t blame overwhelmed medical personnel for things they might have done with 20/20 hindsight. They got dealt the worst of all this. The rest of us have dealt with economic shutdowns, travel restrictions, disruption in our lives, mask mandates, etc. The hospital workers in a lot of areas were loading the bodies of the people they tried to save into trucks. Some of them didn’t feel safe going home to their own families for weeks or months at a time because they were in nonstop contact with infected patients and had little or no protective equipment. A lot of them outright broke under the stress and either quit or killed themselves.
So no, they aren’t the ones able to provide “context” in those conditions. Most medical staff I know were desperate to have everyone do everything they could to avoid any chance of infection so they could just have a break.