Well, I knew it was a genuine issue back in January because I was watching Styxhexenhammer666. I knew that it was a genuine issue when the media was saying it wasn't. Then I also knew it wasn't as bad of an issue they immediately thought it was when elites started getting sick.

I did actually think that it would be a 45 day lock down initially because I didn't see the lockdowns as a way to prevent the spread of disease, but to identify outbreak locations. The only business that's allowed to stay open is a Walmart that records your purchases, and has a single point of entry that is video-recorded? That's not to stop the spread of the disease, if anything, it will actually facilitate it. The purpose was monitoring.

The idea was, after the first 14 day period, they'd know all the outbreak locations. After the 2nd 14 day period, they'd have some of the first locations cleared, and the open up distant rural areas. After the 3rd 14 day period, they'd be able to shut down the final outbreak areas, and open up some of the remaining areas that had been closed previously. I figured this was the case because they were treating it like a bio-weapon attack.

However, the results after the first 14 days of lockdown must have been stunning. Basically every single mid-level city in the US would have had cases. They would have known that they were months too late. It was by March and early April they found out that the first outbreaks in the US were in December of 2019. They would have known there was basically nothing they could do. Those early days probably did look like the casualty numbers could have been accurate because the death rate after being put on a ventilator was 85%.

The idea of "Flatten The Curve" isn't a terrible one. It actually comes from warfare. Snipers don't necessarily try to kill the first person they shoot. They wound them. The hope is that the sniper can take additional shots at rescuers and medics. A dead man is transported only when convenient to do so, and with one or two people. A wounded man needs to be moved urgently at the cost of 4 people on a stretcher. Covid would have looked like a proper bio-weapon from this perspective. It doesn't kill, it just maims so many that it turns the hospitals themselves into killing grounds, and infections can't be stopped so the staff becomes infected to: debilitating the medics just like a sniper would. "Flattening The Curve" just meant spreading the infections out over a longer period of time so that the healthcare system wouldn't fucking implode. China's did, and Italy's did. China responded by basically killing survivors and ignoring the problem. Italy suffered very large numbers of death during the spike given that it was only the Alpha wave. Germany, being ruthlessly efficient, shocked Italy at having almost no problem, because they were far more efficient at managing medical resources.

So, the American response was going to look a lot more like Italy than Germany, but Trump and Team decided to push decentralized responses (exactly the right move), in the hope that decentralization and the market could adjust faster then a planned solution would (which it did). This didn't stop some blue states from doing horribly stupid things.

For the most part, I think I was right. In my red state, unless you were in a big corporate chain store or a government building, life returned to regular normality within 45-60 days, but that was also in defiance of government mandates. By that time it was clear that bio-weapon or not, the disease was endemic and we were just going to have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis. However, that's also when the establishment lost it's fear of the disease and really dug it's heels in for power.