Let a "few more million people" die? There's absolutely no way of knowing if a "few more million" people would have died.
At the height of the original and delta outbreak, what was the death/survival rate (I won't use the real death rate because any discussion along those lines sends CoronaBro's into a total rage). I believe if we'd stayed in lockdown that upon emerging more people would have died because protracted lock downs don't work, and we would have had thousands more people dead because of the mental outcomes of lock downs and also healthcare seeking hesitancy.
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Ok, this is at least a start, I’ll take it. So you’re outlined what you would NOT have done. You would not have mandated lockdown because it is a) ineffective and b) would have drastic consequences in the way of mental health outcomes as well as healthcare seeking hesitancy.
FWIW I don’t disagree with you on either of those points. Did anywhere in America continue to mandate protracted lockdown in any sort of meaningful way? And I’m not asking to be flippant. I only live in one place so my experience is anecdotal but it also seemed my experience was pretty common which was “fairly strict lockdown the first couple months bc nobody had any clue what was going on or how serious it was, followed by gradually more relaxed restrictions to the point that by fall 2020 you could more or less go about your daily life as long as you wore a mask in public (the horror!) and didn’t gather in large groups (again, the horror!)
So, I guess I still don’t know what should have been done. Best I can find is that without a vaccine the baseline would have been about 2500 deaths per day, up to 4500 deaths per day during surge seasons. And that’s just deaths, not accounting for all the hospitalizations that would keep people who needed an appendectomy from being able to have that very time sensitive operation bc every hospital bed in town is occupied by someone with Covid so let’s hope they can lifeflight you out to some remote hospital in Montana bc it’s the closest hospital with any open beds.
But even just from the simplified view of deaths alone, 2500-4500 American deaths a day for each day you don’t have a vaccine feels like a pretty steep interest rate to pay.
