@Sparrowcrane
Everyone's life matters and it's devastating when the people you love die regardless of age or circumstances. However, I do agree that the lockdown measures have been excessive in relation to the risks and stats. We are held in constant fear to comply whereas only a small % of the population has actually died of the virus. I do question the motives of the measures , the more I look into things the more worried I'm getting of where it's all going.
If your only concern is death from covid then I can see how you would think measures have been excessive.
Unfortunately deaths from covid aren’t the only consequence of covid. Hospital admissions start rising from 45+. The majority of hospital admissions will recover (I’m not even getting into long covid but it’s a reality that there are significant numbers left with long lasting damage) with medical support but without it they’re quite likely to either die or come close. See Brazil and Mexico for what happens when you can’t provide relatively simple medical support. The consequence of lots of hospital admissions means deaths from other things will rise. It’s not a case of covid being prioritised it’s a case of treating who turns up at the door first. The knock on effect is massive and unmanageable if left uncontrolled. @DontFaffAboutWills put it very clearly the kinds of choices we would face in those circumstances.
But then people don’t want to think through the consequences of what they think is a simple solution. Even our own government have had to back down from similar policies because they would have basically triggered a massive disaster that would have likely destroyed our infrastructure. Trying to regain control of a situation massively out of control would be nigh on impossible. It almost happened in January and imho could have been softened considerably by continuing the second lockdown for a few more weeks but the pressure to have a firm lifting date won out.
Imho two out of the three of our lockdowns have been because the governments hand was forced and there was no way to ignore how close we were to losing complete control.
With lockdowns have come a lot of people with time on their hands and political agendas have become blurred with pandemic responses. They can be unpicked but most (civilian and leadership) aren’t choosing to do that and there’s very little separation from what is an appropriate pandemic response and civil suppression diluting the cases on both sides of the argument because often the motivations aren’t absolutely in line with what is being claimed.