This is not an analogy. It's just math - the risk of dying from COVID19 if you got it is comparable to the risk of dying this year all things other than COVID19

This is not an analogy. It's just math - the risk of dying from COVID19 if you got it is comparable to the risk of dying this year all things other than COVID19 considered. (approx 0.1% in your twenties, approx 15% in your eighties). If getting it confers lifelong immunity (a question that does not yet have a definite answer), that means getting it means you compressed the overall risks of two years into one[0], or reduced your life expectancy by one year. Now, one year is a lot. But the difference in life expectancy between the US (78) and Japan (84) is already six times as much, so the lockdown in that context is about 6 times more expensive (per day, per person) than moving to Japan[1] would have been before COVID19, and no one would have preached the latter. Here's a conundrum: you can (a) lock yourself at home for 6 months, likely losing your job, potentially keeping in touch through the internet; then come back to "normal" life. (b) give up 6 months of your life expectancy, but go back to your normal life tomorrow. That is, w.r.t life expectancy, you can pause for 6 months and keep those 6 months; or fast forward those 6 months (and thus lose them). Almost everyone I know would pick (b) if there aren't any exception circumstances such as terminal disease. But the western world at large chose (a). [0] That's not exactly true - depending on some other model parameters; reduction of life expectancy by 6-9 months is more accurate. [1] It's not guaranteed that moving to Japan would grant you Japanese life expectancy. It is also not guaranteed that the lockdown as practiced really buys you more than a year either.