BigMatt - What doesn't add up vs. what you don't want to believe vs. bad medical info spread in a facebook meme?
For example:
The Covid mortality rate is NOT 0.01-0.05% You either slipped a decimal point or misused the percent sign. The actual mortality rate is 1.8% right now in the US based on cases divided by deaths. However, that doesn't account for how many more people got the virus without ever knowing it, AND it doesn't account for how many people currently infected but haven't died yet. It is believed that perhaps 8x as many people were asymptomatic. You need a solid antibody study to get to the right numbers (like NY did) and test kits for a new virus are never 100% accurate. Lots of moving parts and each side likes to leave out some numbers to push their position. But everything I have read from reputable sources puts the real estimate for covid mortality in the 0.3-0.5% rate.
Why do you think its part of a secret conspiracy for hospitals to be paid more for Covid cases? Have you seen what they have to go through? ICU beds, hazmat suits, ventilators, negative pressure rooms, isolation, quarantine controls, etc.... of COURSE it costs more to treat Covid patients. This leads to some people thinking the covid death numbers are exaggerated, or the random internet story about someone dying in a car wreck listed as a covid death. But we can settle that easy enough. Just look at the official death totals for all causes every week in every year in the US. See if there is an unusual increase in deaths that just so happens to be during the months of raging covid infections. Coincidence? Magic? People who are faking their deaths and being buried to make a few extra bucks for the hospitals?
Excess Death Chart - CDC
You can see here the US has a pretty regular flow of deaths week by week, year by year, unless there is an unusual event you can identify pretty easily. Like in Jan 2018 there was a very bad flu year, and you can see the small spike above the average deaths base line. AND if you look at the recent spikes above baseline and add them up week by week, it about matches the numbers CDC is tracking for covid deaths. Unless you have some other idea why we have had 300,000 extra deaths in the US, tracked week by week, compared to yearly ;averages.... all since March and the Covid spread started. These are REAL deaths of all causes. Looks to me like Covid is the main cause with the curves matching the tested virus increases week by week. Maybe is could it be a mass tuberculosis outbreak? What do YOU think?
As for Fauci and the masks?? I don't think that is any real mystery or conspiracy either. In the beginning of this outbreak, we didn't have the emergency stockpile of PPE needed (since Obama/Biden used it during their swine flu pandemic and didn't replace it) so of COURSE the first advice was to not have civilians buying up all the N95 masks so that front line health care folks could get the best PPE for their official use. We could all argue whether home made masks are helpful or not, but its pretty clear why Fauci was telling people not to buy up all the good PPE in the beginning.
The numbers are what the numbers are. In the big picture, even the real number of 300k covid deaths makes it only about 5-10x more deadly than the common flu. And we could all argue about whether that is ever worth shutting down the country, but you don't need to fake up a bunch of statistics to say the economic shut down was a bad idea. The US is a big country with 320 million people. And even at 300k deaths its only about a 10-15% increase above normal (apx 2.8 million deaths every year). Heck, yesterday Slovenia had 43 deaths in one day and Bulgaria had 143 deaths. But scaled up to match our population size they would have had over 6000 deaths in one day.
Its real.... but its not so bad that we need to lie about the numbers to argue a different position regarding shutdowns or masks. And its everywhere, even where Trump was not President... so its not fair to blame him either. Its just a shitshow for the entire world at the moment.