> Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.

Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.

> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?

Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?

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EDIT to explain further:

Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:

OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.

OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.

In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.

Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.

If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).

Incarceration happens because of a willful act. A pandemic, like seasons or natural disasters, are events beyond the control of individuals except for preventative measures that mitigate risk.

You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.

This Kantian mindset has to go.

That's kind of the point: There was a pandemic in 2009 that everyone seems to have forgotten about because we didn't have such an extreme response with things like masks and lockdowns, and the world didn't collapse. Neither did it this time in the areas that didn't have such an extreme response. It was unnecessary, and a lot of people realized this early on. Some of the pushback is from that group. Most of the rest is from people who just want to decide the risk for themselves instead of having it forced on them.

This is completely unrelated to the point I was making. Come on, going to prison was just an example of something bad that decreases quality of life. Can you please try to engage with the actual argument?

I believe there are several important points missing from this discussion.

Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.

Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.

Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.

Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.

All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.

In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.

>What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?

How much runway do you think the average service industry business has?

How much runway do you think the people it employs has?

My favorite Chinese buffet is now an armed forces recruiting center. The adjacent movie theater is unoccupied. I can go on.

I'm not saying it should have been business as usual but to ignore that many parties lost big because of what was done is to be misleading at best.