I agree that the potentially disastrous long term outcomes on a lockdown that drags on for months will make the Coronavirus death toll look like a walk in the park once you’ve removed the very elderly and already very unwell people from the figures. That’s not to say that they don’t matter or are expendable, just that in many, many cases they would have died this year anyway, or in the case of people with serious underlying health issues, every day was already a lottery for them and if it hadn’t been COvid-19 it could have been any other virus/infection at any time, and they were always living with something considered life limiting.
The long term repercussions on society, employment, marriage and relationship breakdown, possibly being pushed into to negative equity, elder abuse, poor mental health, suicide rates, domestic violence, soaring rates of alcoholism and child abuse are potentially catastrophic.
People will riot. They will war with their neighbours. They will murder their spouses, they will beat their children, they will starve and dehydrate to death because they were already living on the margins of society with little social contact, etc, etc. People like to say the economy doesn’t matter compared with saving lives but they forget that you can’t save many lives when your economy is shot to shit. We are sacrificing the economy to save people from dying of (or with) with Covid-19 now, but once this is under control we are still going to need to treat people for cancer and heart disease and dementia and MH problems and everything else. Those things haven’t gone away. And where will the money come from then, when so many more people who were tax payers have lost their livelihoods?
Personally, if it were up to me, rather than a total lockdown on the healthy to protect the vulnerable, I’d rather have seen all people considered highly medically vulnerable sequestered together in an isolated/shielded environment (for example the government could have commandeered cruise ships and hotels for this purpose) where the outside world could more easily be kept at bay, much like children being sent off as evacuees in the war. Then let the rest of the fit and healthy population go about their business, practising simple social distancing in so far as it was possible to do so without needing to be obsessive about it. But still going to work, still doing normal day to day things and still keeping the economy and jobs ticking over.
Anyone vulnerable who didn’t want to avail themselves of the chance to be shielded would sign a disclaimer to say that they understood they might be were low priority for a ventilator if needed, because they were unlikely to have a positive outcome compared to someone younger or healthier. Of course there would be some unexpected deaths among the supposedly fit and healthy, but we are seeing that in a small minority anyway.
But I don’t envy the person who gets to make the call about any of this, or who says how long is too long and what extent of lockdown is too much. It’s a thankless task with no easy answer. Anything less than total lockdown for six months minimum will have the eugenics conspiracy theorists jumping up and down and accusing the government of cold blooded murder, so fuck knows what we are supposed to do. This is the price we pay for being ‘civilised’ I guess. It may well be our undoing.