We can accomplish many great things if we knowingly discard ethics for the sake of efficiency, yes.
Or, to put it more bluntly, a modern ethics committee would have rejected the idea of installing sewers in cities to prevent disease because one builder of the sewer might have died in the process. Without that, industrialisation probably would never have happened, and we'd all be subsistence farmers today.
Because it was thought unethical to conduct studies around masks and infectious disease, the evidence was sparse, so the WHO and CDC didn't recommend wearing them. This has directly led to tens of thousands of deaths.
You get to choose whether to be in the business of installing sewers. Saying that it's ok to force people into medical experiments against their will for the greater good is how you get Nazi holocaust atrocities. Medical ethics has a long history that it sounds like you might enjoy spending some time reading about.
I'm disappointed by your false equivalence between being told to stay home and safe and being made into a guinea pig.
If being home and safe means you lose necessary income, then your ire should be directed at your governments at all levels for refusing to prepare critical safety nets and regulatory environments that would make it possible for you to stay alive and safe without laboring every day. But advocating a regression on everything that history has taught us about medical ethics is terrible and bad. We're talking about thousands of years of accumulated and refined history lessons here. Medical ethics is a perfect example of why learning history is important.
This has economic repercussions. A good amount of meat processing plants are now idled because the workforce is off sick due to lack of protective equipment and sick leave. We are looking at meat shortages. I hope people make the right connections.
If people start to starve because we stopped being able to produce food or people start dying of other causes because our basic infrastructure start collapsing, then you can start talking about ethical dilemmas.
I think its a safe bet that this is already happening on small scales. Noone is measuring the degree.
There may be images of long lines of unemployed people that have to get from the government or food banks, but the food is still there. Farmers are still producing, distribution networks are still working, essential services operating. That part of the economy is still going.
This is the false equivalence. How long does one have to stay home in order to be "safe"? If things calm down now, will they be worse in the winter? Will we still have to be "safe"? How do the consequences of curve flattening strategies that look more like half-hearted eradication attempts be compared to approaches that look literally like curve flattening?
Noone knows these answers.
"The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector."