I don't agree with it, but I understand the reasoning. If you look coldly at what is going on, the whole global economy has suddenly come to a full stop, and a quarantine to be effective needs to last for months. Under these conditions businesses will be going under left and right, many people will lose their jobs quickly and en masse, etc...
This will be an economic meltdown that is going to make the 2008 economic crisis look like child's play, and THIS TIME we won't have a strong (in terms of economy) China to bail the rest of the world out. It will last a very long time (if we ever completely recover!), there will be hunger, there will be civil unrest and the consequences can be very serious indeed.
In the end and unless a vaccine comes up, all we are doing now is preventing the collapse of the world health systems by flattening the curve (number of infected at one single time), because otherwise this will NOT stop until 70-80% of the population has been infected and becomes immune. 3.2% of those who get infected will die ANYWAY (mostly the weak, the sick and the elderly, but not only), and keeping the curve flat will also avoid the deaths of the other 4% of the infected who would otherwise die due to the lack of intensive medical care.
So the choice becomes: do we die from the disease or from the cure? What is worse in the long run? How many more people will be affected - and indeed die - by an economic crisis never before seen in the modern history of mankind?
The alternative to shooting the economy in the head is to keep people going and working despite the pandemic (in a way that is what happened in the 1918 Spanish flu). Most (80%) will experience mild symptoms, and those who will have to die, will die, but those who remain will not be facing global economic chaos once group immunity is achieved in a year or so.
Worse, the dying will basically have to be sent home to die, as none of the world's health systems can cope with a pandemic of this magnitude without completely collapsing, which in turn also means people dying from what would otherwise be avoidable deaths (accidents, curable diseases, etc...). There would be mass graves like it happened in 1918 due to so many dying in such a short period of time, etc...
A monstrous choice from a purely humanistic perspective. After all, how much would you pay to bring a loved one back, if only you could? I think most people would give all they have.
I believe the expression that more suits the situation we are currently in is 'between a rock and a hard place', or even 'out of the frying pan and into the fire'.
Apologies if this is a very bleak analysis of what is going on, but I think people should be aware of what is happening and what can POTENTIALLY happen.
