The thing that makes COVID novel is that it's extremely contagious. Your part in quarantining is not spreading it to the more vulnerable/unlucky people in your life. Because a 2% death rate in a country of 300 million people is still 6 million dead in an entirely preventable way.
https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...
where is your 2% number coming from? CDC estimates the infection fatality ratio as: 0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
That’s not a bad thing. A bad thing would be if our response caused more harm that the additional harm the virus would have caused but for the response, but that it caused more than it allowed the virus to cause is not a problem.
> and the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met.
No, they haven't. It's true that both the restrictions in place in some jurisdictions and the criteria for step down have been revised based on better understanding of the virus and associated activity-related risks, but that's not the same thing (and has resulted in loosening of some restrictions directly and easing of some criteria, as well as tightening other a restrictions and criteria.) But they haven't moved in response to meeting preexisting criteria.
You think we should just ignore new information ?
That can happen from failure or from success. The far more important comparison is response vs. what the virus would have done without that response.
> the goalposts to end restrictions keep moving once the previous criteria are met
Criteria like what? The only one I've seen is trying to get the rate of spread down and we really haven't managed that.
COVID-19 is (so far) about 10x-20x deadlier than the common flu which we have vaccines for and approaching about half of the total death toll of the 1918 flu which is considered the deadliest in modern history.
What is your basis for "extremely high survival rate"?
Approaching half of 17-50 million dead?
> In the U.S., about 28% of the population of 105 million became infected, and 500,000 to 850,000 died (0.48 to 0.81 percent of the population).[129][130][131]
We're pretty close to half of 500k.
the deadly virus with the extremely high survival rate?
>maybe we are going to have to change our definition of normal
no we won't. things returned to normal after much more serious pandemics. people are already realizing the risks of this virus were oversold and starting to move on.