Your proposed alternative is woefully inadequate and doesn't stop the exponential spread of the disease anytime short of most people getting it.

You flat out do need to shut down most things to get the spread rate below 1.0. Cancel all gatherings of people, shut down non-essential businesses, etc. That's all that works.

that's presuming the need to stop the virus at all costs. if we were dealing with the black plague, or even the 1918 flu, that would be entirely reasonable. but with covid-19, that's still debatable, especially given the costs of doing so.

we're apparently collectively ok with 30K americans dying of flu (or alternatively, auto accidents) every year, so it doesn't make sense to go nuts on stopping this virus that's looking more and more like it's a little worse than the yearly flu.

the point being risks need to be properly assessed and proportionately addressed, without hysteria.

the underlying question about whether we value human lives enough is another matter we certainly should continue to discuss (for the record, i think we should value human lives a little more relative to economic considerations, and the response to something like covid-19 would correspondingly be a little more proactive, but still not hasty and panicked).

"this virus that's looking more and more like it's a little worse than the yearly flu."

You're spreading ignorance.

Every medical expert is saying it is 5-20x deadlier than the seasonal flu, because that's what the data says. They're predicting 40-70% infection rates.

A low estimate of 0.05% mortality rate with 40% infected is: 640,000 dead in the US alone. It could end up being a 1.5% mortality rate with 70% infected: 3,360,000 dead in the US alone.

Please do some reading: https://www.flattenthecurve.com

It would likely be >1% mortality rate even with adequate healthcare. If it hit 40-70% of the population though, people would be basically on their own, so mortality rate would be 5-10%. Tens of millions of deaths.

Of course, this would never happen, since we as a society would enact major policies to slow the spread long before it got anywhere near that bad, just as Italy is doing for example. It just doesn't make any sense to wait for things to get worse to start enacting policies to slow its spread; if we're going to have to do it at some point, might as well do it early and reduce the spread.