Our business BOOMED during Covid which was not expected but makes sense now in hindsight. We never closed during Covid. We were all back in the office a week after the mid-March lockdowns. We took precautions but were open and exposed to the public and indoors. We had zero spread of Covid at our home office or our individual facilities for two years. It ultimately caught up with us in the home office in spring of this year.
We were lucky, many businesses (like hospitality industry) were devastated. It's easy to sit in an ivory tower and say lockdowns were no big deal when your pay checks kept coming. We locked down, and then threw money at the problem. According to one economist, the government gave out 3x the amount of money that was lost. I know people that bought new boats and homes with their PPP money. Like the health policies the money should have been targeted, but this is what happens when you let the government run a giveaway program. We're paying for that now with runaway inflation and supply chain interruptions.
Add it to education interruption and mental health issues to name a few others. The full ramifications of which will not be known for years. Was it worth it? Dad4 claims we saved 1 million lives with lockdowns and restrictions. I suspect that deaths might have been higher had we not had lockdowns, but I have a hard time believing that it was a 1 million. I think comparing states is a fools errand, there is really no common denominator that either increased or decreased deaths between states. The virus did as it pleased. Those that died were not demographically the go out and eat and drink crowd. That group tended to be home bodies.
The people most impacted by the lockdowns and restrictions were the least vulnerable to the virus. Our health policies just didn't add up. The virus was a "Darwin disease"; however, we treated it as if it was the plague. Bad call. History will not look back kindly on our policies.
