I've got no problem with debating this sort of reasonable thesis. I only have a problem when people push extreme conspiratorial meme narratives designed to gin

I've got no problem with debating this sort of reasonable thesis. I only have a problem when people push extreme conspiratorial meme narratives designed to gin up and spread partisan emotion while being systematically immune to disproof like a religion. If you point out their thesis has an issue because of some government mortality statistics, they immediately move to conspiratorial doubt of the validity of those statistics. These folks are just a baby step away from the mental diarrhea of 5G COVID, Bill Gates vaccine chips, etc. FWIW, in my ideal world, the government would have had a stockpile of a couple dozen N95s for each person, and we would have distributed them immediately after the initial outbreak and enacted some serious rules with teeth about wearing them. That probably would have been good enough to keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. NPIs could perhaps have been limited to sit-down restaurants and similar activities. I also think that, while anti-lockdown types may be right about some government mandates, they may be over-estimating the impact of those mandates. Most of the socioeconomic impact of COVID has been from individual people choosing to avoid their normal activities because they don't want to get COVID.