The pandemic has been awful. But imagine it had struck 20 years ago

The problem with discussing our options is that anyone can play the "people are dying, so you're being inconsiderate" card. I agree that the virus has caused excess suffering, but our actions to prevent people from living life have caused suffering too. It's not clear that pausing our collective lives, ruining countless small businesses (while large businesses reach sky-high profits), driving up mental health issues, making policies that disproportionately hurt the poor (while providing nearly zero financial assistance), and promoting mask use to the point where citizens are default distrustful of each other for over a year of our short lives was worth it. Given the very low risk of dying from the disease, it seems that the biggest impact of the virus was its ability to remind us all that we're going to die.

I understand that the virus is causing substantially more deaths than usual, but that's not saying much for the vast majority of us. We've solved most causes of early death so very few people as a percentage of our population will die in any give year. Therefore something like this virus can show up on the leaderboards without actually biologically destroying our society, or even getting close to it. The average American had a mere 10% increased risk of death last year and the average American had a negligible risk of death to start with. Plus, the average American is overweight, and if you just managed to not be overweight, the additional risk factor falls well below 10%. That's not a valid reason to shut down most social aspects of our society when we are extremely socially dependent animals. If aliens had humans in a human zoo, they might consider it inhumane to separate us from each other for so long.