zlacker

I imagine if it were deadlier, people would have been more incentivised to deal with it. Bodies piling up on the streets is a much better motivator for staying inside and socially distancing than news reports of regional hospitals being gradually overwhelmed by a predominantly mild or asymptomatic virus.

The fact is that even ignoring government response, all of our medical institutions seemed to presume that this was yet another [avian, swine, bird, ...] flu outbreak and it would be about as minimally impactful for the west as the rest have been. Which indicates that doctors and hospital administration were either not reading the literature coming out of China as early as last january 2020, or they simply disregarded it as sensationalist and/or sloppy. And, to be fair, given the state of crisis that our research institutions are in globally, I can't entirely blame them, though I still think it was irresponsible that no one seemed to make any preparations for months after the outbreak was apparent. It's as if everyone sat on their hands waiting for the government to tell them it was serious.

>>tryone+(OP)
Medical professionals are commonly wildly uninformed about recent research. Most GPs don't keep up on new research decades old let alone cutting edge research out of lancet.