Dragonlady
Designing Woman
They maintained it until the economy crashed and they could launder money to big corps and big pharma.
The worst economic crashes were in the areas where the disease was allowed to run unchecked. The cost of treating all of the sick people is what crashed your economy, and the refusal of a sizeable percentage of your population to get vaccinated, has kept it circulating and mutating.
In countries with strict lockdown and masking policies, our economies weren't crashed by the high costs of testing and treating 1/3 of our populations for covid. Our pandemic was over with as soon as 80% of our population was vaccinated - 6 months before your nation gave up on your unvaccinated population and re-opened anyway.
There were over 111 million cases in the USA - that's 1/3 of your population. Over 1 trillion tests were administered, 3.5 tests for every person in the USA. The government paid for all of the testing and the all of the treatments for all of the sick people, as well as all of the vaccines.
Contrast that with Canada. Fewer than 13% of our people got sick, only 1/7 of our population. We didn't have the same level of expenses in testing or treating our population. Our hospitals were never overwhelmed. We also never ran out of PPE in our hospitals or nursing homes, so we didn't have significant losses due to covid among our health care staff, either. Mask mandates were everywhere.
The biggest difference between Canada and the USA is the 7 Provincial Conservative governments stopped fighting with the federal Liberals, and they all cooperated to keep Canadians safe. Nobody played politics with the pandemic and the lives of our citizens.
A pox on Donald Trump and the Republican Party for their failure to do the same.