>I wonder how one can sleep at night with the knowledge one was directly responsible for thousands of deaths. I have to disagree, this is not how public policy

>I wonder how one can sleep at night with the knowledge one was directly responsible for thousands of deaths. I have to disagree, this is not how public policy works and there are more than just loss of life to consider such as economic impacts and cascading effects. You cant consider this from a "all lives are sacred and must be preserved" perspective. Believe it or not public policy DOES put a price on life and for good reason: you cant mitigate away ALL risk of death. Think of speed limits or even the normal flu death rate. You can't have a functioning society if everyone lives in bubbles and drives 5mph because all life must be preserved. Even the US CDC acknowledges this, and they themselves calculate on average the economic loss of a human life is 10 million USD over their lifetime. When the mitigation cost (including cascading effects) exceeds this, then its not considered reasonable to implement at a public policy level. Sure he is an epidemiologist but he has been designated to make a public policy decision so I don't think its fair to place the blame on him. Flatten the Curve focused on hospital capacity and the avoidance of overwhelm and triage death, not necessarily covid related death and not preserving all life. The area under the curve is the same, we will all be infected at some point. I highly doubt any vaccine will be effective since they were failures for SARS or MERS. My money is on better treatments.