You are speaking as if the people dying by lack of treatments / surgery would have been avoided if COVID had been left uncontrolled, which is the total opposite.

All the beds would have been occupied by COVID patients!

That's what happened with the 3rd wave in Canada, most 80+ already had their vaccine so the death count wasn't high but everyone who got covid in lower age brackets spent weeks (and are still there), which forced some hospitals to move their ICU ward to parking lots in army Baracks.

The 250k number was not completely uncontrolled. It was apparently supposed to be "optimal" in the sense that it's the fastest way to reach same number of people who would eventually die whether it took 3 months or a year to reach herd immunity. The plan still includes social distancing and things to prevent it becoming overwhelming.

Maybe. I would still like to see a thorough analysis (post mitten if you like). Everyone takes it for granted, it is not obvious to me. But of course possible.

In a vacuum, I would agree. However, given that 'herd immunity' was absolutely not the approach east asian countries were going for, many of which had been battling with COVID already, and who had a great deal of experience in respiratory diseases, I think it was at best reckless.

I guess the thing that bugs me is that Boris Johnson is kind of a flippant person, and that approach carried over to the response to COVID, with the weeks of head-start we got being wasted as he missed important meetings to work on a Shakespeare book, and made the whole thing out to be some kind of joke, when if he had actually being paying attention, he probably would have seen it for the deadly threat it was before he caught it (and nearly died of it).

I’m curious how Sweden’s herd immunity strategy worked out for them?

Seems pretty well, actually. I'd be interested to know why - I'm also not entirely clear if they 'stayed the course'. I think there's also the aspect that not all lockdowns are created equal, so it's possible that the swedish restrictions might be actually more restrictive (in terms of virus spread, if not civil liberties) than the UK ones, which had a notable gap when it came to workplaces.

> all the deaths from lack of treatment, surgery,

Is there evidence of any of these? I thought this was just a political talking point that wasn't based in reality of any sort, as there hasn't been any academic quantification of it that I have found, and I haven't even found any stories about anecdotes in the media, which is exactly the sort of thing the media loves to sensationalize.

9% of people in England, and 23% of people in Northern Ireland, have had crucial treatment or surgery postponed, effectively indefinitely. This isn’t necessarily all life-threatening, eg includes hip replacements etc. but that’s not exactly benign either. Note these are percentages of population, not of patients or cases.

A friend of mine is a senior neurologist at a major hospital in the UK. He said that under Covid all his junior medics, who do a lot of the actual treatments and other legwork, disappeared to other departments. Not only are they not treating and diagnosing neurological patients, but also not getting the job-specific training for when Covid is over.

This is sort of quantitative anecdata, granted, but serious enough that it makes me think it is a real issue.