The things that generally kill Americans (heart disease, cancer, car crashes, diabetes, etc) aren’t contagious, so this is a bad analogy.
If getting it confers lifelong immunity (a question that does not yet have a definite answer), that means getting it means you compressed the overall risks of two years into one[0], or reduced your life expectancy by one year.
Now, one year is a lot. But the difference in life expectancy between the US (78) and Japan (84) is already six times as much, so the lockdown in that context is about 6 times more expensive (per day, per person) than moving to Japan[1] would have been before COVID19, and no one would have preached the latter.
Here's a conundrum: you can (a) lock yourself at home for 6 months, likely losing your job, potentially keeping in touch through the internet; then come back to "normal" life. (b) give up 6 months of your life expectancy, but go back to your normal life tomorrow. That is, w.r.t life expectancy, you can pause for 6 months and keep those 6 months; or fast forward those 6 months (and thus lose them). Almost everyone I know would pick (b) if there aren't any exception circumstances such as terminal disease. But the western world at large chose (a).
[0] That's not exactly true - depending on some other model parameters; reduction of life expectancy by 6-9 months is more accurate.
[1] It's not guaranteed that moving to Japan would grant you Japanese life expectancy. It is also not guaranteed that the lockdown as practiced really buys you more than a year either.
New data is showing that the fatality rate from covid-19 is more like existing risk we were all previously exposed to in the course of our existence, and not like a second version of smallpox.
That’s assuming no second order effects like a shortage of medical care making things worse.
For one year (or however long it takes to reach herd immunity -- and if longer, then death rates wouldn't double but increase much less). Assuming recovery confers significantly long lasting immunity, which I agree is not a trivial assumption (and one we don't know yet how reasonable).
Definitely not trivial, but -- in context -- means a reduction of life expectancy by less than one year. The US already lags Japan by 6; there's a lot that can be done to improve it by a year, with costs much lower than those currently spent to avoid reducing it by a year.
An important thing to recognize is that the disease itself is not an existential threat (even smallpox wasn't; even the plague wasn't!), but our response to it skirts creating one.
We need to give the scientists and medical professionals and industry more time to figure out how best to prevent this. There are many reports of 40-50 day illnesses in young people due to not clearing the virus. And the poorly named 'mild' case can be rough. It's (badly imo) defined as when a patient doesn't require hospital. It should be called moderate I think. [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-coronavirus-mild-sympto...
Cardiovascular diseases 29.34%
Infectious and parasitic diseases 23.04%
Malignant neoplasms (cancers) 12.49%
Respiratory diseases 6.49%
Unintentional injuries * 6.23%
Perinatal conditions 4.32%
Digestive diseases 3.45%
Intentional injuries + 2.84%
Neuropsychiatric disorders 1.95%
Diabetes mellitus 1.73%
Diseases of the genitourinary system 1.49%
* includes car accidents
+ suicide, violence, war, etc.In the US, it’s largely the things I listed.