I’m an engineer too and I’ve gotten frustrated by the fact that people are getting all up in arms and forming strong opinions when in fact we are in a situation where to tell the truth “nobody knows nothing”. The facts and data change by the day, if not hour, for example for the last month we’ve been hearing “why don’t we have enough ventilators? If we’d taken this seriously in January we could have built 10s of thousands of ventilators and headed off this problem! First off, as an engineer in manufacturing I can say you can’t just start spitting out tens of thousands of a complex machines overnight, or even over the course of months, especially when the supply chain is in shambles and we’ve sadly come to rely on one “bad actor” country I won’t name here for many critical components.
Then we hear New York, the hardest hit area so far hasn’t had a shortage of ventilators. And now it’s coming out that ventilators aren’t that effective for critical patients. So all the screaming and hand wringing about ventilators might well have been misguided.
At this point there is still a lot more unknown than known. We don’t even know the numbers of people infected, so death rates and critical case %s are at best an educated guess, and at worst a WAG. Could be 3%, I’ve seen other estimates it’s under 1%.
We won’t know until the future after the dust has settled.
Confucius said something to the effect that a wise man is not wise because of how much he knows, but because he realizes how much he doesn’t know.
Maybe my irritation and frustration is from being constantly bombarded by hearing people who are so far from wise.