The gorilla in the room that no one’s wants to acknowledge…we locked down to allow people who were likely to die within the next 3-5 years to maybe survive a couple of those years. The price of the lockdowns economically, physical health, mental health, and in education will be paid by folks who were probably never in much danger from this virus for decades.

I fully believe that historians will look back at this time and talk of the lopsided cost/benefit.

How many people die in car accidents each year?

I'm curious what you think of Florida, which has had almost no restrictions for a majority of the pandemic and yet is actually doing better than some other states. Seems to disprove your assertion?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...

I understand that's not currently the case in a lot of the world, which is why I think cars need to be banned eventually, not right now.

Which implies you have some problem with the ordinary state lockdowns. These were certainly poorly executed and yet we can Sweden with nearly ten times the casualties-per-capita of an equivalent nation (Norway). Where my actual point about people taking their own measures is that life was sucky in Sweden as well as the rest of the world.

So what you effectively saying is: "I don't care if things were not that different in practice, for my principle of freedom, I'll 10K deaths without quality of life that different."

Edit:

"the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures"

Trust is a pretty disingenuous term here. What's actually happened is that the people who took risks were the people who economically forced. Ironically, that include workers who took care of the elderly; poorly paid in Sweden and elsewhere, they then took their infections to the elderly concentrated in homes. Stopping this would have required more measures than any of the nations were will to do.

I disagree with him but I wouldn't want to silence him. He needs to feel free to express his viewpoint and we should feel free to attack those views with other views and maybe throw in some facts to strength our case.

Of course, someone can also say everyone has bias what with it being a global pandemic, but it's still useful to be cognizant of said biases.