It was like watching every single person forget every single thing they'd ever learned about medicine ever.

Exactly.

What helped me understand some of this craziness was Mattias Desmet's research into "mass formation". This was caused by military hypnosis tactics "4th level warfare". In many countries, these military were also involved directly and instructed the media to produce certain articles. Including the staged news and crisis actors.

Desmet's research warned me that aggressive resistance would be used by the insane to become more violent against the sane people. We saw that in some cases were people were strangled/suffocated, because they did not wear a mask.
Making insane people look silly and foolish did seem to work.