The reality is that we do have to all agree on the same strategy or else none of the possible strategies can work.
Some strategies kill more, and some prevent the most deaths.
At first the lock down started as a good idea because it gave us time to get some statistics, and prevented hospital over flowing.
But once we figured out the R0 infection rate was very low, around 2, then we knew you only needed 55% for herd immunity, so than the lock down became extremely counter productive and killed people unnecessarily.
With an epidemic, time is of the essence, and the longer you let it spread, the more people are bound to die eventually. But "flattening the curve" increases the area under the curve, so kills more. It just delays their deaths a little. In fact, it actually prevents eradication of the virus, so can potentially keep the virus around and killing people, forever.
The lowest loss of life is to eradicate it the quickest.
There are 2 ways to do that.
One is a totally quarantine, that prevents any spread, and that would wipe it out in 2 weeks.
But we likely waited too long and never prepared food for such a total quarantine.
So the only other choice is accelerated herd immunity.
Vaccine are the best way to do that, but they won't be ready for years.
So then what you do is not quarantine everyone, but just the elderly and vulnerable.
Then you ask for volunteer from the young and healthy.
That totally eradicates the virus in about 3 weeks.
Lock downs like we are doing have proven to be failures.
We did a lock down for Spanish flu in 1918 and caused it to linger for 3 years, which caused huge loss of life.
Lock downs always maximize the death total, by delaying how long we take to achieve herd immunity. For then it is still herd immunity that ends it eventually.
