https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch...
Yet for some reason the West seemed intent on pursuing lockdowns, demonising countries like Sweden and Belarus which didn't.
Hospitals have never been overloaded (apart from places like New York where symptomatic patients were sent back into nursing homes - or Italy, with generally inadequate pandemic preparations) and in places like Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
As soon as we realised we were over-intubating patients, and that proning and oxygen treatment were sufficient for serious admissions, and that Vitamin D and C (and other cheap and generic treatments) were enough for the general population, the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated.
And yet we still persist with lockdowns despite them causing a greater amount of harm than the virus itself due to factors like interrupted education, mental damage, and interrupted regular medical treatment.
There were political games afoot in both China and the West in terms of this virus. The fact that the American economy was booming just before the re-election of a non-mainstream, anti-China president, and that pandemic responses justified mail-in voting on an unprecedent scale is too coincidental to ignore.
Look at raw gdp growth data and that was without major tax cuts. Nothing proves that the previous US president did anything more than "ride the wave".
Also, debts were greatly increased even before covid and the current president will have to fix that, again...
Additionally, lockdowns have an additional reason, namely to not overload healthcare so the situation doesn't get out of control. While rural areas can play denial, that's not an option for bigger and more dense areas/cities. A lot of hospitals were running on the edge, where >90% of capacity was for covid and delaying all other ( even urgent) surgeries.
Ps. Sweden has a very low population density. Not everything there applies elsewhere.
They even admitted they were wrong with having no lockdowns.