What would be your response to the small business owners who lost their livelihood because government arbitrarily decided to cut off their revenue stream?

The kids who are being left behind because schools across the country have gone virtual?

The increases in domestically violence? Suicide and depression rates?

The unavoidable health decline because people have been forced in to their homes and apartments for several months?

There’s a boatload of problems in the US. COVID is a symptom - not the cause.

Health is the antidote to COVID - not lockdown. And as we see, far too many people have spent years upon years sacrificing their health and now suffering consequences.

My response is that we should be mad at the government for failing to enact policies to actually eradicate COVID, who instead decided that it's hopeless and that we should only use halfhearted, ill-enforced methods of questionable effectiveness. And further more, we should be mad at them for failing to take more effective fiscal measures in response to the pandemic to actually support people who are hurting financially as a result of it.

The rough price of a human life in estimates of cost-benefit analysis is on the order of $10-100 million. That puts the cost of pandemic in lives lost in the US alone as of this date to a couple of trillion dollars. Were the pandemic to infect everyone in the US, the resulting death toll would have a calculated cost of approximately 100% of yearly GDP. The economic costs of a lockdown are a bargain in comparison.

>My response is that we should be mad at the government for failing to enact policies to actually eradicate COVID, who instead decided that it's hopeless and that we should only use halfhearted, ill-enforced methods of questionable effectiveness. And further more, we should be mad at them for failing to take more effective fiscal measures in response to the pandemic to actually support people who are hurting financially as a result of it.

Yeah, agree with all of that.

You seem to think I'm advocating for hard lockdown, which I never said.

I see this pattern in COVID discussions all the time. Someone claims COVID is overblown, people push back, then the response is always "yeah but lockdowns are horrible!". It's largely a strawman.

Lockdown and restrictions have been the primary means to control the spread of COVID.

COVID, as a disease, should be taken seriously. It is absolutely more serious for some than others. Ultimately every person needs to exercise personal responsibility instead of demanding that others change their behavior.