I am sick of this tone of superiority so often used here. It's so elitist and so out of touch.

In Scotland, the mean COVID death age was higher than the average lifetime expectancy[1], which indicates that on average those people would probably live <10 years had they not contracted the disease. The expected remaining lifetime of the average individual in Scotland (if it remains unchanged) is ~37 years, which would reduce the lifetime adjusted death toll by at least 3.7.

There have been a significant amount of excess deaths that are not attributable to COVID [2]. I suspect that such deaths have a lower average age (e.g. due to suicides), than COVID deaths, further reducing the average life years saved due to the lockdowns.

I'm not proposing that we should optimise for life years saved, but I do think that the death of a 86 year old is less tragic than that of a 38 year old, and that we perhaps shouldn't evaluate lockdown vs no lockdown purely based on the percentage of the population which died.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-54433305 [2] https://www.newswise.com/factcheck/are-a-third-of-the-excess...

I will answer this, although more than likely my comment will get killed soon:

I believe that the high-risk people (elderly, immuno-compromised, people with diseases that put them at risk) should go into voluntary quarantine if they wish, together with a government package to support them. Anyone who wishes to undergo lockdown can also do so, although with no package beyond what they would normally get. The rest can do as they please.

This will not stop the ICU beds from filling up obviously, which is why they should be triaged to high-risk patients, frontline staff, and people who underwent quarantine and lockdown. When capacity allows, other people too. The people who chose not to lockdown deal with it, or die.

This is probably unimplementable in the real world. That said, it would mean the lowest amount of economic stress (which kills silently) for the following years. On some level, it also appeals to the human need for cause: those people that died of corona and didn't get treatment "did it to themselves". The high-risk people do not get sacrificed.