You are missing the point in that if nothing was done in terms of trying to (at least temporarily) contain COVID, then the economy would be just as bad off. We

You are missing the point in that if nothing was done in terms of trying to (at least temporarily) contain COVID, then the economy would be just as bad off. We're currently at 50K deaths in the US, largely in a four week period. I think it's safe to say that the shutdown has cut the death rate in half, if not more. If 100K people die in 4 weeks in the US, the people will shut the economy down whether the government initiates it or not. Either way we're screwed. And I think your data is far off in terms of IFR and CFR. Imagine the IFR being a magnitude higher for COVID versus influenza. I personally think this is a safe guess based on what we've seen in a wide variety of environments, complicated by different testing methodologies etc etc. So we'll use 1% for the IFR. Now current thought is the R0 is between 2 and 5. Hopefully closer to 2 since R0 dramatically affects the percentage of infections required to reach herd immunity. But to be simple, we'll assume we need 50% to reach herd immunity. So we'll use 164M as the number of Americans needing to be infected before we can "return to normal." With 164M cases, and an IFR of 1%, 1.6M Americans will die. An additional 9% will need hospitalization, but survive. That's 14.8M. Say we're off by a lot and "it's just a flu" with an IFR of 0.1%. You'll have 164K fatalities, and we'll still have the 14.8m hospitalizations. Say the hospitalization rate is off by a magnitude, it's still 1.48M. There's no way our country can operate "normally" with these types of numbers.