Meanwhile I haven't given anything up, so it's very easy for people like us to sit here while earning our full income from home and say, "Yes, this makes sense. It is totally worth it." It's worth it to us because we aren't paying the cost. These stay at home orders and quarantines have overwhelmingly and profoundly impacted people who were already struggling without offering them a path forward. Rest assured the economic uncertainty from shut down was a catalyst behind the BLM protests. The people impacted by shut down are predominantly poor and minorities, and the fact we haven't considered how to share that burden before stabbing in the dark is what makes them racist.
At the global level, malaria kills almost a million people every single year, mostly children under 4. There's no herd immunity and it has and will continue to happen for decades. The WHO anticipates due to new covid travel restrictions on malaria relief workers an additional 3 to 4 hundred thousand deaths due to malaria will occur in Sub Sahara Africa alone. Surely malaria is a pandemic that shadows covid by any measure, except the measure where it overwhelmingly affects poor black people. Meanwhile the second our society is faced with something which mostly kills old white people, the average age of which exceeds the average human lifespan, we're cancelling school and creating a generation of illiterate 2nd grade children while their parents are left with no way to feed them.
So yeah the reaction to covid has been first and foremost selfish, and given the government is a historic institution of race, these orders are themselves the children of our racism.
Every analysis shows that however much restrictions hurt the economy, letting the disease just run rampant and overwhelm the medical system of every country in the world at once would hurt it much more. If every government had taken decisive action and forced (yes, forced) people to self-isolate for three weeks, this would have been over in March and poor people could have gone back to sending their kids to school and health workers could have gone back to helping stop malaria in Africa. But we didn't, because of our all-important freedom to harm others, and because of people like you who dare to call us racist for even trying.
You're right that it sucks being poor. It's awful. It's unconscionable how we treat our poor. I hoped that COVID would come with a silver lining where we could start really trying Basic Income on a country scale and seeing how it (almost certainly) works wonders. Maybe it still will help people understand that governments are actually capable of helping people.