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The problem is we as a society place too much importance on 'life' rather than 'quality of life'. There has been too much focus on preventing short term deaths rather than a long term view of what the post Covid-19 world is going to look like as a result of the measures we've put in place to contain things.
I realise it's not a popular view and losing loved ones is hard but many people who have died will have welcomed death and I know many of my parents elderly friends stuck in care homes who have openly said they wish they'd catch it so it could finish them off. My Grandma always told us 'never leave it too late to die', she always regretted the fact she ended up in a care home. Maybe we'll finally start to have open discussions about euthanasia after this is all over.
Saffronspokes-
@ffm and your posts all seem to miss the fact that quite a number of the deaths are not of very old people, or people with significant underlying health conditions.
A big risk area is men over 60. They may be slightly overweight, a bit out of shape and perhaps are or were smokers, but they could well die from this disease, or have it so bad that they never recover similar lung function. They could previously have happily lived another 20 years. You happy to open things up so all these people are at significantly increased risk of getting it? Plenty younger than 60 have also died, many with no significant health conditions (i.e. about to die anyway).
Also, letting it sweep though the population will overwhelm the hospitals - you content for all the doctors, nurses, paramedics and care home workers to deal with that?
I don't think it's as clear cut as you think it is in terms of who is dying from this disease.
Scrabble
I think that too much discussion of the the costs of the lockdown are along the lines of "But what about the economy?!!!" to which, people quite reasonably respond, "people's lives are more important." When it's all couched in terms of "the economy" then it comes over as a plea not to imperil the profits of shareholders and business owners, which is not exactly compassionate.
However, there are a whole load of other impacts, which are much more directly deleterious on everyone's wellbeing. Not just the loss of livelihood for those who are already struggling, but mental and physical health issues, loss of school time for kids etc. etc. I don't think the cumulative effect of these across an entire population of 65 million has really been weighed up against the threat to the sections of the population who are more vulnerable to the virus.
To put it another way, I was discussing this the other day with one of my more pragmatic acquaintances. I put to her the twitter-friendly rebuttal to the Trumpian message (that it's ok to let a few old people die to keep things going), which is "ok, choose which 2% of the people you know you'd choose to die." Her response was basically "if it came right down to it, that's actually an easy decision to make." In a way she's right; it's a decision that we should put off for as long as we possibly can and find every way to avoid making, but if we absolutely have to choose between losing some of the elderly vs. a potential lifetime of mental health problems and educational delay for children across the entire country, it wouldn't be a coin-flip, we know what we'd chose.