That's the reason I started this thread. There are so many opinions and changing of rules but it's really hard to just trust the CDC and WHO because there's still so many unanswered questions because accurate stats aren't readily available. We're just supposed to trust, not verify.
Fair criticism, but our sorta free-market approach to healthcare makes universal databases of things like hospital beds, staffing and functional reserve problematic. Mortality data has other issues, like accounting for inconsistent access to testing and undiagnosed asymptomatic/minimally symptomatic infection.
Furthermore, the lay public has little background in statistics, epidemiology and SOP for healthcare facilities. After nearly two years, it’s still unrealistic to expect non-experts to learn a fraction of those complex topics. Even if the data is available, it’s usually imperfect, fluid, and easily misinterpreted. As an example, look no further than VAERS.
We’d all do better to trust people who devote their careers to studying and controlling infections. While they can make mistakes as well, the prevailing opinion of infectious disease practitioners, public health officials and workers caring for hospitalized covid patients should carry a lot more weight than politicians, hospital administrators, and mixed martial artists. Economists and educators also figure into that equation somewhere. But ultimately pandemics should be managed by those who know stuff about infections, with input from many other disciplines.
Aside from a few topics, like masks and thresholds for enacting/removing restrictions, I feel like the actual experts have been pretty consistent in their messaging throughout an evolving pandemic. The problem is seldom enough information, rather, it’s non-experts ignoring their advice in favor of alternative opinions from less qualified individuals. Unsurprisingly, these alt-experts often promote simplistic strategies which require minimal personal effort and inconvenience. No amount of data will undue our human tendency towards confirmation bias and maintaining the status quo.