Your conclusion is wrong.

You can live to an old age with common conditions like diabetes, vitamin D deficiency, and subclinical heart issues.

Also, unless you think old age is a curable health issue, shutdowns are still the only way to keep people in that group safe.

> improving diets and removing pollution from the air

How does one improve the diets of billions of people in a few days?

Shutdowns are instant. Major overhauls of civilization are not.

Actually, his conclusion is correct:

https://www.wfla.com/community/health/coronavirus/new-cdc-re...

I wondered how long it would take you to be sucked in by the narrative that people dying of COVID aren't actually dying of COVID.

Did you know almost nobody died of HIV? The vast, vast bulk of AIDS deaths were due to systemic collapse resulting from unchecked infections that set in when the victim's immune system was destroyed by HIV.

Given that information, would you be okay refraining from treating an HIV infection if you had one? Do you think the time and effort spent stemming the AIDS epidemic was wasted?

Didn't you read it was the Center for Disease Control that put this narrative out?

Interestingly though the shutdown did more to remove pollution and improve diets (more home cooking vs. fast-food) than anything else we've done over the last decade.

Not sure that's the conclusion at all, I've certainly read quite a few stories of very fit and healthy people becoming quite ill. While we all want a quick fix to this I think we need to let the scientists do their work and approach treatment methodically rather than jumping to solutions that confirm our own biases.

This is a reply only to your comment and has no bearing on my opinion about the parent: It's very possible that those young people are outliers and unusual cases (very small numbers statistically) which is why they're stories and why you probably know about them. (That's how the media works. What's 'usual' is boring, and doesn't sell papers.) What's the data on most patients who are hospitalised or die? It may be different.

In fact, without being a scientist, AFAIK this is one of the major problems of science and how it is consumed, understood, and used/abused in society at large, but also within the publication realm itself. If a certain scientific finding is boring and merely confirms something else (which is critical in science), there are less incentives to do it. As a result, truth becomes characterised by 'sensational' things, not necessarily true or accurate things. Scientists and followers of science fail so much to see our own biases and shortcomings. We're getting there, but we're hampered very much by our human nature.