If left to work it's way through our society unobstructed it will kill many more people AND the economy which cannot handle a half-million or million deaths in the space of a year.
How can it not work its way through society?
This is kind of like chemotherapy.
They blast both healthy cells and cancer cells with poison, hoping the healthy cells will grow back.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
But it usually sucks pretty bad.
Now they are sort of doing the same.
Blasting the economy and the livelihood of tens of millions, hoping it will kill the disease, and the temporarily out of work and suffering, innocent, people will somehow bounce back.
There are absolutely no guarantees that they will.
If they don't bounce back, we've got a ruined economy with tens of millions of jobless and homeless people.
There are absolutely no guarantees that the people saved by the lock down will not be greater than the people killed by the lockdown.
Every percentage increase in unemployment is associated between 10,000 suicides.
But politicians and others with power tend to choose based only on what they can see in the short term.
They never care about long term negative consequences.
That is always somebody else's problem.