I'm pretty sure that, much like with Prohibition, the moral baggage is the entire point. The idea is that for this disease - and only this disease - we have the absolute moral obligation to minimize the number of deaths no matter what, and that anyone who suggests there are tradeoffs is a monster who literally wants to sacrifice people.

It made more sense at the very start, when many people expected that we'd spend 2-4 weeks doing only "essential" things and then we'd return to mostly normal life. But yeah, it became clear pretty quickly that wasn't the trajectory, and the required messaging shift never ended up happening.

Those people were under informed. Everybody "in the know" knew mid-March, before the lockdowns, that health officials wanted AT LEAST 8 weeks of shutdown to be able to have an impact and measure it.

The information was out there..