Agreed, it'd be wrong to tell people it's okay. It's not okay, a lot of people are going to die, and even more people would have died if we didn't take costly measures to stop it. This has been and will be the worst experience of a lot of people's lives, and it'd just be a lie in another direction to pretend that's not so.

What seems to be a noble lie is the apocalyptic mindset, where the coronavirus is literally the only thing that matters and we must never ask if a particular mitigation is worth the cost. Many authority figures are promoting this idea, even though they clearly don't believe it themselves and couldn't formulate effective policy if they did.