Addendum: I posted this fully understanding how unpopular it would be with this crowd. If we ever get hit with a a more fatal and contagious virus this may be our only way of preserving life. And as things stand with our industrial meat processes I suspect we will have more viruses to contend with.
It is not this simple. You can't, in our current system, shift wealth that readily and quickly. Even if you could, how would you approach possibly selling this in a democracy? And assuming it was feasible, and we could get popular support for it, how would it be implemented? Rationing cards? Government ran food stores?
This is NOT the Spanish Flu. It is very different in its behavior. There is currently no evidence to expect a more deadly, virulent second wave. Please remember that the Spanish Flu was anomalous because it had a more deadly second wave. Almost all viruses, as a function of evolution, become less deadly over time.
And this ignores all of the vast improvements in our understanding of sickness and hygiene, our availability of clean, sanitary conditions etc. Hell, even the change in density between 1918 and 2021 is massively changed.
This has been proposed by legitimate legislators. https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1270000771132731397
As for your claim to a lack of a second wave, I'll have to defer to the experts on that. I'm looking at a historical case for a worse case scenario which I think is prudent to consider.
The Fed seems to be doing just that
But the moment a number of apparently healthy and young people start dying from it, people start thinking thateither a) it's hard to know in advance whether you're at risk (e.g. unknown pre-existing conditions) or b) the disease is stronger than previously thought.
And that's even if the actual cause has nothing to do with (a) or (b), i.e. if the data was just a statistical fluke or misattributed deaths (e.g. people dying from X who also had sars-cov-2 in their system). It doesn't matter; there is no time to get to the bottom of things. The authorities have to play it safe, least they will be proven to have acted recklessly. And even if they try to be "brave" and plow ahead, the public opinion will quickly sway towards playing ir safe.
This seems to be an especially strong force since people today have an unprecedented capability of communicating and broadcasting "gossip". Even China's strictly controlled public communications wasn't able to censor spontaneous outrage from the citizens. And the fact that China reacted they way they did, set a high bar; any country that wanted to act differently had to be play it pretty convincingly to their populace (e.g. "we can do it, because we're different, we are so disciplined we can pull it off")
But it surely takes a lot of confidence to pull that off, knowing that opposition parties will feast on any opportunity to publicly decry your recklessness.
Covid-19 is real and it kills people, it's effects can be and will be measured.
We do make tradeoffs between economy and safety all the times, but we do that for things we're used to (traffic, pollution, diseases prevention, ...), so some people expect we can do the same kinds of tradeoffs with covid-19.
Again, I'm not an expert and have no idea on how to compute such a tradeoff.
But my point is that there is a inanimate force that is just pulling that card off the table.
It doesn't help that in some countries it also became such a heavily partisan topic.
I'm not from the US. I live in a country whose government has been very proactive and the population is generally supportive of the (re cently lifted) lockdown. And that's a country where rarely the populace has anything good to say about the government (a popular saying "it's raining, damned government!")
Playing it safe seems much more effective politically, that unless you want to play some "strong man" narrative like some governments did, there doesn't seem to be any advantage in taking excessive risks.
Personally, I don't feel that there are many population centers in the US that are prepared to do the kind of testing that seems like would be needed to properly identify the sick.
Alternatively, you need a total quarantine isolation - e.g. anyone working in a care home should live there and can't touch their kids if they go to a school where will be spread because everyone else's parents are not on lockdown. Or the most vulnerable will die.
We could start by NOT sending people with confirmed COVID-19 infections to live with them.