have to assume that letting more people die would wreck the economy too.

Obviously doing “nothing” would have destroyed the economy. Basically every expert agrees that doing nothing would have resulted in a huge loss of life, and an insane hospital burden. That would wreck the economy all on its own.

So the question is whether there’s some point where we could do “less,” and get the balance right. We’d do enough to make the death and illness problem not destroy the economy, AND save some lives.

But we can’t talk about this as though the economic devastation is purely the result of government actions. The illness itself was guaranteed to wreck the economy all on its own.