The completely plausible world in which our healthcare providers wouldn't have been able to get any effective PPE during the initial wave and died, became seriously ill, or refused to work en masse in the first month of the pandemic?
Explain why that was not a believable risk in Jan/Feb 2020?
Right, you’re continuing with the assumption that the hoarding problem was noticeably different between the two worlds. But any one hoarder can cancel out the restraint of 10,000 people. The scaling doesn’t work in your favor there. What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply. You’d need to be able to point to healthcare workers who procured masks solely because they didn’t get bought because everyone was thinking “yeah Fauci’s right, masks increase the spread because I’ll touch my face more”.
There was no such spared supply. It was either saved by retail throttling or state pre-emption, not because it was withering unwanted on the shelves.
> What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply.
The second part here just doesn't actually substantiate the first part. If this were strictly true then I would've never been able to observe 1) a medical professional purchasing a mask from a retailer and 2) a non-medical professional declining to purchase an available mask from a retailer.
In fact I observed both.
Of course it's an open question as to at what scale this occurred and how it nets out in the end against the credibility hit, it very well could've been minor and not worth it, but that's the thing that remains not obvious even now, never mind in early 2020.
The completely plausible world in which our healthcare providers wouldn't have been able to get any effective PPE during the initial wave and died, became seriously ill, or refused to work en masse in the first month of the pandemic?
Explain why that was not a believable risk in Jan/Feb 2020?