What happened in Italy, New York City, and others was absolutely tragic. No one should die that way and a very good argument could be made that we as society failed all of those people and their loved ones.

Death tolls in this early outbreaks did, though, show that severe illness and death was almost entirely impacting individuals with multiple comorbidities, which weights heavily towards the elderly population.

We also knew as soon as the vaccine study preprints were released that the studies were not designed to test for protecting against infection or transmission, they were only comparing symptomatic illness over roughly 30 days.

Governments coordinating censorship of any ideas that question the relative risk of the virus or the vaccine efficacy claims touted by politicians was completely unreasonable. Not only was it a massive overreach and destruction of many democratic values, it was silencing discussion of reasonable concerns given scientific information that was already available at the time (namely the population distribution of deaths and the tested hypothesis in the vaccine trials).

We were all operating at some level of fear during the pandemic, but now that we've largely moved on its time we actually take a sober look at what was known when and how the decisions made at the time actually measure up.