Hey, back from vacation. Sorry to have not replied before. Sending EM too.
When this first started, a Science critic on youtube named Thunderfoot thought if we did nothing we would lose some 3% of the global population and the impact would be serious. Even if many were 80 years old, how many of them were medical doctors (Like Fauci himself) bankers, investors, etc. I think the real number has been somewhere around .098 %.
There are costs and benefits to what we have done. I would like to see some kind of post mortem on what we have done ala what is suggested here but I'm not sure I'd trust it anyway.
I think Thunderf00t was/is quite far out.
Covid mostly affects the old. If I remember rightly, the chance of dying roughly doubles with every 7 years of life.
About 15-20% of the population of Western countries is over 65, and we could probably expect about 5% of them to die from covid. Between 50 and 64, ~0.5% max, mostly those with certain conditions like high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, lung problems, etc. 40-50s, sub 0.1%. Under 40s, very low. If covid had been totally rampant, I'd have expected the West to lose not much over 1% of the population, almost certainly less than 2%. Of course, it would have shattered our health services in the process.
Developing world countries would lose far fewer as a proportion of total population just because they have far fewer old people. Thus I suspect the global toll would have been comfortably under 1%.
I certainly agree that the world generally and individual countries need to look very long and hard at covid. Countries like New Zealand and Taiwan could perhaps isolate themselves much easier - it might not be possible for every country to do that. But if Germany lost proportionally half as many as the USA and UK, I think we have to accept Germany did a much, much better job and look at why.
You might well be skeptical of such a commission. I'm generally of the opinion that the US political system is at least borderline broken; taking control of governance seems to have become much more important than governing well. (The same is true of the UK, although perhaps not quite so bad.) It is not surprising both fared so poorly.