But then you're prioritising Covid patients over patients with other health problems. Lockdowns cause other problems, such as mental health, suicides, cancer patients not getting urgent treatment, patients not being able to get GP appointments, routine screenings not being done, etc etc.
The vaccines seem to be working for the majority at the moment, i.e. reducing seriousness of covid, and deaths from covid. We can't protect everyone from covid, and yes, sadly, there'll be some for whom the vaccines don't work, or who can't have the vaccine. We can't protect those people at the expense of giving other people health issues or killing other people.
If hospitals are "too busy" with covid, then, sadly, some covid patients will end up not receiving medical care. That's what happened during the lockdowns, but then it was people with covid who got the medical attention, but those with all manner of other conditions, some serious and life threatening, didn't care the medical care they deserved. We can't do that again. Why should a covid patient trump a cancer patient??
So let me get this right - you're saying that someone who works with the public and is at high risk of covid (nurses, doctors, bus drivers, teachers, police etc.), and gets covid, would not be as entitled to medical care as someone who wfh but has a heart attack or has cancer?
Even now, lots of people needing healthcare can't get it because of the backlogs and the NHS still isn't back up to speed.
Lockdowns have caused a lot of damage and misery - probably moreso than letting covid rip without lockdowns.
Badbadbunny - the NHS doesn't have backlogs because of lockdowns but because of covid. Do you understand how bad it is for patients with other illnesses to get covid as well? How dangerous it makes surgery? How hard it makes to carry on normal treatment when staff are ill? (But perhaps you agree with the previous poster I quoted and think that covid patients shouldn't get medical care at all?)
Letting covid rip at the start without lockdowns would have been catastrophic for hospitals but more so for all the people who couldn't get into them and get any kind of medical care for anything. Lockdowns are the only thing before vaccination that has kept the lid on covid just enough for hospitals to carry on with some of the most important treatment for other things.
A lockdown is an emergency measure used only when you need to stop cases growing, fast, for whatever reason. No one can say we won't ever need to do that again (I hope we won't).
Anyone suggesting that we should just not treat covid patients needs to think through how that would actually work in practice. You would need to persuade medical staff to triage people not according to their clinical need, but according to whether or not they're covid positive. They would need to knowingly send people dangerously ill with covid back home, perhaps to die, while accepting people into the hospital who are not in imminent danger. Seriously, how on earth do you think that would work, even if it was a fair way to treat people? As a strategy that would create far more problems than it solves.