You're blaming this all on the shutdowns, but really, much of what we're dealing with right now is due to a response by the federal reserve that lasted a lot longer than it should have.
I don't think 'the economy' is worth millions of deaths. The fact that over 1m people died in the US is an absolute disgrace, but had we done nothing, we would have had another 3-4M dead. You really think it's possible to have a functioning economy with that sort of death toll? The actual 'shutdowns' were very short lived. Much of what you're discribing is down to natural human behavior in the face of risk. Even if covid only has a 1% death rate, the rates of long term side effects of infection are what? 10%? That's huge, and 'long covid' is something we're still grappling with today, and will do so in the future.
China is an excellent example of what not to do. After years of zero-covid policies they've effectively given up, let the chips fall where they may, and their economy is getting ravaged as covid burns through their population.
How would we have had another 3-4 million dead? All any restriction did was delay exposure. Yes, a vaccine arrived but one which has questionable efficacy and which wanes in effectiveness (hence the booster programme). All we did was spread out any Covid related deaths at huge costs.
I don't know if it would have been that high, but the whole (initial) idea of "flatten the curve" was exactly that. Saturated systems stop working as expected. When hospitals reach capacity then neither covid nor non-covid patients will get adequate treatment.
"Questionable efficacy" in what sense? You can argue that possibly for transmission, but certainly not for endpoints like death. See the recent Lancet study, for example.
I don't think 'the economy' is worth millions of deaths. The fact that over 1m people died in the US is an absolute disgrace, but had we done nothing, we would have had another 3-4M dead. You really think it's possible to have a functioning economy with that sort of death toll? The actual 'shutdowns' were very short lived. Much of what you're discribing is down to natural human behavior in the face of risk. Even if covid only has a 1% death rate, the rates of long term side effects of infection are what? 10%? That's huge, and 'long covid' is something we're still grappling with today, and will do so in the future.
China is an excellent example of what not to do. After years of zero-covid policies they've effectively given up, let the chips fall where they may, and their economy is getting ravaged as covid burns through their population.