It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.
(BTW, take all death estimates for old pandemics with a giant pinch of salt).
But at any rate, COVID didn't fill the hospitals. New York had a problem temporarily due to bad management of their very limited morgue capacity, but look at most other places and there was no issue. Even in Bergamo early on, in the period when doctors were accidentally killing patients with unnecessary intubation, they never actually ran out of hospital capacity. Go check the reports at the time if you don't believe me.
Unfortunately, almost everything that people believe about COVID and what happened during it is wrong. When it came to hospitals what you'll see if you review the historical evidence carefully is that media reports and online commentary frequently blurred the line between "it is predicted that hospitals will overflow" and "hospitals are actually overflowing". The former rapidly became reported as the latter with no actual change in the situation. This kind of problem of predictions/reality getting mixed up cropped up many times in different contexts.
Then on top you have the problem of outright fake or misleading reporting. For instance, there was a brief period when TV news crews simply faked reports of full hospitals. They often liked to do this by reporting on a local hospital and claiming it was straining/at the limit etc, then showing video footage of an ICU in Bergamo from months or even years ago without informing the viewer of where it was, leaving viewers to infer it was a video of what was actually happening. This trick with that specific video happened so frequently it became something of a meme. In another case, a news crew turned up and organized doctors and medical staff at the (in reality fairly quiet) hospital to get in their cars and pretend to be patients queuing up to enter the hospital. Someone local got suspicious and visited the hospital a day after the report, discovered there were no queues or overload problems anywhere and asked around what had happened, which is how the news crew were found out.
If you remember, this blew up when bored medical workers started uploading videos of themselves dancing to Tiktok. This revealed the true situation at a time when people were being told to stay home to save the hospitals from overload.
I remember getting into an argument with my German teacher about this topic, because the Swiss health minister (Berset, ugh) actually went on TV and claimed hospitals were overflowing. The Swiss government's own dashboard showed that there was no unusual level of hospital load, there were lots of free beds all over the country and there were no problems to report. He literally just made up a non-existent crisis. They do this because it works, she had no idea he was lying and when I tried to show her the actual graphs just got distressed, saying "I'm not a data person".
There may have been bored medical workers somewhere and conditions varied by country, but I think it's generally understood that there was a shortage of medical professionals? Travelling nurses were making lots of money, for example. There was also a backlog from postponed medical procedures.
But in any case, I think you kind of proved the point that if what you say was true, it wasn't generally known.
I don't think there was any shortage of medical professionals. There was a shortage relative to the demand predicted by models, but as that demand never materialized neither did the shortages (for COVID treatment).
Medical procedures were postponed because some governments emptied out hospitals in anticipation of huge influxes of patients, they believed this would happen due to academic models with no validity. So this then did lead to backlogs for non-COVID treatments, but it was an artificial backlog and how bad it was depended on how quickly governments realized the academics were charlatans. In Switzerland hospitals were only emptied out for a period of weeks because the private hospitals started going bankrupt and laying off medical staff due to lack of work which played very badly with the "we will be hit with a huge wave of demand" narrative, so they quietly reversed the policy and hospitals went back to work. In the UK OTOH the NHS stayed emptied out for months. With no bankruptcies to deal with the problem was able to remain ignored for longer, and so they ended up with unsolvable backlogs. They're working their way through it slowly now, but partly by just letting people die whilst waiting. Catastrophic :(
Everything I'm saying was widely known in the community of "sceptics" who realized that the government narratives were built on lies early on, but admittedly in 2020 when this was going down that community was quite small.
> There was a shortage relative to the demand predicted by models
This is wrong. My friend who is a New York City plastic surgeon was pressed into monitoring a floor full of patients on ventilators. Meanwhile in Idaho, the hospitals were full.
Saying that hospitals in the UK National Health Service “stayed emptied out for months” in the middle of a pandemic is a rather remarkable claim. What evidence is there for it?
