Seeing that doing nothing will likely lead to lead to millions of deaths, how would the lockdown possibly kill more than that? Are you under the impression people will just willingly starve to death, or that fighting over food will get so bad that millions of people will die?
The lockdown is wasting months to years of billions of people's lives. That has to be equivalent to some number of deaths, hard to quantify how many, but it's greater than zero.
Also, a bad economy literally kills people by starvation albeit in foreign, poor countries that don't have food surpluses or the ability to print USD.
And if we locked down the global economy for a year or two until a vaccine is developed, yes it's not out of the realm of possibility that millions worldwide would die a result of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th order consequences of that decision. Look how many stress fractures are occurring after just a few weeks. You think they'll get better with time and continued stress?
Honestly I think the UK had the best original strategy of locking down the people most at risk, make sure they're taken care of as much as possible, and letting everyone else get herd immunity as quick as possible. But people weren't/aren't willing to accept that, and likely still won't for at least the next few weeks.
Finally, the UK changed their strategy away from sequestering the 70+ population because Imperial College told them that would only halve their death toll, and it would still remain solidly in the millions (for a country of 66 million).
But if we're just talking about the US: The range from the CDC models last I checked is anywhere from 163,000 - 1.7 million for a country of ~330 million.
By comparison the opioid epidemic alone has already killed somewhere between 100,000 - 200,000+ over the last 5 years. And that was largely the result of a kinder, gentler, less dramatic economic shock known as the 2008 recession and decades of preceding industrial decline.
We've already compressed shocks that took months in 2008 to weeks, not the least of which is the record unemployment filings in the posted article. Hence the largest stimulus package in world history being passed in days.
"The economy" is not some vague abstract number on the evening news, and economic shocks do kill people, it's just less tangible than a virus. If this continues for more than a month or two I expect people returning to work out of desperation and then receiving death threats for doing so, and things will get uglier from there if the lockdowns continue.
The problem in the UK is that they seemed to have no substance to the plan. Yes, hard lock down the people at risk, but where is the government response to make that possible?
If they had a well developed plan to carry out those words it might be worth doing, but they didn't and then caved when it was clear it was just rhetoric.