Except there's not necessarily any malice exposed by this explanation. To incur massive economic cost is literally deadly. For example, in the UK austerity is

Except there's not necessarily any malice exposed by this explanation. To incur massive economic cost is literally deadly. For example, in the UK austerity is blamed for tens of thousands of deaths (some people say 130,000, others 30,000). The unpalatable fact is that trade-offs need to be made when deciding how to tackle this. In the case of covid-19 I don't envy anyone who has to make these decisions, due to the exponential nature of infection spread making small changes in measures potentially have big results. We are all in uncharted territory. Hopefully the examples of countries such as Italy will help decision makers get it right, or perhaps more importantly will influence peoples' behaviour to reduce transmission. Also, I think he's wrong about the Y axis equalling "deaths" - the point is to keep cases manageable by the health system, which minimises deaths. Dragging things out doesn't necessarily improve outcomes for at-risk people.