I'm sure that accusing someone with righteous indignation here feels edifying, but it indicates to me that people are perfectly okay with trading on lives - future ones. At least admit it clearly and live with it.

I think the interesting question (that we don't know yet) is how much of these actions are political because they want to show themselves strong and the public demand some kind of action. And how many of these actions are needed to flatten the curve, prepare the healthcare system and to work on cures/vaccines? For example shutting down schools have a huge effect on society but does it have a similar huge effect on the spread of disease?

How long can you just shut down industries, keep kids out of school and will it make a significant dent in the total mortality? It could be that a couple of weeks of social distancing will be enough but can it be months and what are the comparable effects.

I know it is more dangerous than the normal flu and I will not downplay that but take Italy (that yes, would be worse of without shutdowns) you have 4k deaths so far; mostly old people while a couple of seasons ago they had 24k deaths attributed to a bad flu season.

The social distancing and shutting down society needs to work reasonably fast otherwise I wonder if it is worth it, at least in countries where you already have widespread disease.