Your suggestion that you can safely just quarantine and not be a risk to others is flat out wrong because you are at your most contagious 24-48 hours before you have symptoms.

Also you may not have immunity after you sheltered and recovered.

I'll agree with you that the response was pretty terrible though.

The links I provided give some indication of the poverty and educational disruption this causes, but unfortunately it's hard for people to admit that mass-quarantines were and continue to be wrong, because this issue has been politicized.

Maybe you're right, and quarantine after contraction of illness was not a fully effective method of transmission control, but just the elderly isolating, instead of every one, was, and is a much more proportionate and sensible way to deal with a pandemic that only the elderly are highly vulnerable to.

This seems to be a big part of your reasoning but I don't think this is true. Yes, risk does skew there. But there are large numbers of non-elderly people who have been severely affected.