To me, the alternatives have costs and benefits. Circumstances are different between 1918 pandemic 'flu and now and this looked at USA. I'm sure lots of holes can be picked in the following. But for those who are convinced that lockdown shouldn't have happened, children's futures 'are being stolen', only the economics are important and the economics of lockdown are worse than not locking down, I found the following extract was an interesting read to me. It's in a popular magazine discussing a research paper. The magazine link is - www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/new-laws-pandemic-economics/609265/
Rule 1: “Save the economy or save lives” is a false choice.
Last week, a group of economists from the Federal Reserve and MIT published a paper on the 20th century’s most murderous flu, the 1918 outbreak. Because the federal government in 1918 offered little if any economic assistance to suffering Americans, the local response from city leaders varied widely. Some places, such as New York and St. Louis, quickly ordered social distancing and other interventions, while others, such as New Haven and Buffalo, allowed public gatherings even weeks after the flu reached crisis levels. This variance gave researchers the ability to see which cities recovered the fastest after the outbreak.
“We were expecting that the areas with more [social distancing] would have a worse economy but less mortality,” said Emil Verner, a co-author of the paper and a finance professor at MIT. But early and aggressive interventions both saved lives and triggered a faster rebound in several measures, such as job growth and banking assets.
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The infamous trade-off between people and GDP? It doesn’t exist—or, at least, it didn’t in 1918. The reason, Verner told me, is that pandemics are “so, so disruptive that anything that you can do to mitigate that destructive impact of the pandemic itself is going to be useful.” Without a healthy population, there can be no healthy economy.
This simple idea has some weird implications. “In a normal recession, you want to boost demand,” said the Northwestern economist Martin Eichenbaum. “But we don’t really want to boost demand in the very short run at all, right now. We don’t want United to be flying full planes. We don’t want restaurants serving food to dine-in customers. We want everybody to stay in and hold on.”
It follows that we should—as incomprehensible as this may sound—hope for a deep, short recession, caused by a cliff dive in many forms of economic activity. That would be a clear signal that people have gone home and that the face-to-face economy has been shut down to limit the spread of disease.
“The question I would ask of our leaders is: What will you regret?” Eichenbaum said. “Will the government regret that it didn’t save money in early 2020? Or will it regret that we let a viral infection kill millions of people, which also, by the way, led to the death of a lot of great companies? It’s pretty obvious what the worst-case scenario is. You want to err on the side of saving lives.”