Money is an abstraction we use to measure (relative) value. Wealth is the sum total of physical goods/services/resources that we rely on.
When you neuter an economy, as we have done in the US, you destroy real wealth. There is no way to counteract that by injecting money. It’s like trying to claim your company is growing because share buybacks made your per-share price go up, yet your market cap in an efficient market has been unchanged.
It is no surprise then that someone who holds that view would have trouble seeing the real damage that a shutdown like ours does. We have postponed elective surgeries, leading to furloughing tens of thousands of medical workers across the country because in many areas hospitals are practically empty. We’re halting meat packing plants because some portion of employees have tested positive. We’ve stopped educating our children in person despite covid-19 being less deadly than Influenza in children (this is a fact at this point).
We treated a really bad but manageable papercut by chopping off our hand, and in doing so we have widened inequality in _every dimension_. What does a poor school-aged child who does not own a laptop do with remote schooling? What do millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and are now unemployed do? What about those postponing important preventative care that will prevent future deaths from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes?
How large of a spike in suicides, opioid overdoses, and psychosis are we going to see?
We took a bunch of otherwise healthy people, instilled them with disproportionate, all-consuming fear, and have had people in social isolation, which not only produces its own mortality but will also retard the natural exchange of micro-organisms that our health relies upon.
And the biggest joke of all is that eradication is impossible and therefore we didn’t prevent any mortality, we just postponed it, while destroying the quality of life of the 99.4% of the population who never would have died from this thing anyway (there’s debate as to whether the IFR is .3% or 1% but I think .6% is a very conservative number)
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In answer to your question about models, you are right that we need more of them, and in rereading your comment I see you were more raising questions than advocating a pro-lockdown stance. In any case I encourage you to check out http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=69.... I’m on mobile right now otherwise I’d quote from it but they look at it in terms of wellbeing-years