I fully supported lockdown and would continue to support measures to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed if indeed that was what would happen with COVID raging out of control. We are a long way from that though, and the doomsday predictions of last week are already looking to be false as the increase in hospitalisations is much smaller than predicted (and well within our capacity to cope).
As it turns out, the NHS was nowhere near being overwhelmed, even at the peak, and certainly isn't now with hospitals largely empty and the overflow hospitals being repurposed. When it became clear that the NHS was 'safe' I don't understand why health services weren't restored in full months ago - we may be protecting them from COVID but them not running is causing suffering and death from numerous other causes instead.
The original message was never one of 'eliminating' the disease or preventing all COVID deaths, and I wouldn't expect it to be as people sadly die from all kinds of things every day and you can't eliminate that risk. As sad as 7 deaths are, the average daily death count in Scotland is something like 150, and as Wax says, none of these other deaths are acknowledged in daily briefings. Other infectious diseases like flu take a huge toll every single year and put strain on the NHS, but we have never shut down society to try and constrain them. We live with them. I also now think that our balance of priorities is heavily skewed in the wrong direction, and that the harms we are doing to prevent COVID greatly outweigh the benefits.
I suspect that our politicians (and NS in particular with all her 'close to elimination' chat over the summer) have painted themselves into a corner now, so we're stuck on a path of reporting every COVID death and being seen to take action to prevent spread. They can hardly do a U turn and say 'actually, at this point we're going to have to get back to normal, even though this means accepting that some more will die of COVID' as the politics is too toxic for that level of honesty. So instead we're stuck in an endless cycle of lockdown and resurgence, desperately hoping for a miracle, with no clear end goal in sight.