Welp...I'm done walking the dogs. Time to address this nonsense:
1. What metrics are you basing the assertion of "NY is a **** show" off of? I live and work in NY. My hospital is in a county with one of the highest positivity percentage rates throughout the second wave and we're in no way, shape, or form a "**** show." We have a designated COVID unit with about 10-15 patients currently as well as about 5-8 other ICU cases. There has been no bussing of patients from busier hospitals, no fighting over ventilators, no ICU spillover onto floors not equipped to deal with ICU patients, no moratorium on elective procedures, etc. Our patient load is very manageable and we're basically operating close to the way we used to before COVID hit. Hell...we're even starting to allow visitation again. Indoor dining is ramping up and things are about as close to normal as they've been in the past year.
2. The point that there are no studies that prove lockdowns work is objectively false. A study of the Wuhan outbreak indicated that the time for the number of cases to double rose from 2 days to 4 days, indicating a slowing down in transmission due to lockdown measures (
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32181488/). There's also this one that suggests that lockdowns in Italy reduced transmission by 45% (
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/19/10484)
3. Again, you're using mental health as a prop for your bogus argument. When you put posts like this into the context of your history on this forum, it becomes pretty clear that you don't really care about underserved individuals until you can use them as cannon fodder. Has this country had an ineffective response to the mental health crisis? Undoubtedly, and that statement was just as true far before COVID was even a rumor. You're placing blame on "the lockdowns" for ruining people mentally and financially, but your brain seems to stop dead in its tracks at that point and doesn't ask why we didn't have a stronger response from the Federal Government to provide sufficient aid for these vulnerable individuals. Why is that?
Also I find it a little odd that you trust your wife, the Emergency Medicine physician, more than you trust the overall consensus of Infectious Disease specialists. I could cite the director of Family Medicine at my job, who is an anti-vax weirdo who believes in Bigfoot and was convinced that Donald Trump was going to be secretly inaugurated on March 4th, but that would be cherry-picking one "expert" opinion in a sea of research from more specialized individuals that completely contradict what he's saying. I'm not interested in the confirmation bias from some finance bro, and no one else should be either.