> If it isn’t severe, then why bother protecting yourself at all? (Leave it to those that want to, or need to, to protect themselves.) It was a severe disease

> If it isn’t severe, then why bother protecting yourself at all? (Leave it to those that want to, or need to, to protect themselves.) It was a severe disease for a certain portion of the population, especially before the vaccine. If you're willing to write off anyone with any preexisting condition and with older than a certain age, or just have them not participating in society for a few years, that's one kind of tradeoff. Everyone taking extra precautions like wearing masks and trying to socially distance is a different tradeoff. There's no getting around the fact that given a novel risk, we as a society had to make tough choices and tradeoffs over how to deal with it. There was no way to get out of this with zero negative impact - because the world gave us a bad situation.