So it turns out that—and this has to be the shocker of the century, a total plot twist nobody could have anticipated—if you recklessly terrify people into staying away from the hospital for nearly two years, they'll get really sick:

[Emergency rooms are] too full. Even in parts of the country where COVID-19 isn't overwhelming the health system, patients are showing up to the ER sicker than they were before the pandemic, their diseases more advanced and in need of more complicated care.

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions and suicide attempts, among others.

But there's nowhere to put them all. Emergency departments are ideally meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with their primary care physician or being sufficiently stabilized to be transferred "upstairs" to inpatient units or the intensive care unit.

Sooo if I'm reading this right, in addition to wrecking roughly two years' worth of children's educations and overall lives, as well as engendering a nationwide scourge of severe hypochondria and germaphobia, in the end we also engineered a massive wave of advanced illnesses that are now overwhelming our medical system!

Hey, maybe we should try that "two weeks to slow the spread" thing again—you know, to keep the hospitals from collapsing.