It's not the Feds fault, it's the pandemic.
And even if it did, was it ethical, fair and is it a reasonable price to damage the economy and life prospects of hundreds of millions of young people who weren’t at statistical risk?
Its important because it means the current and future mess is down to bad science and politics and not an act of god.
Not really. I agree with the thrust of your post but there is definitely no considerable debate being had on this topic, because Near-Zero COVID is the only acceptable policy, and saving lives at any cost along with it.
I'm not willing to ruin my life on the chance some 90 years old may catch the flu and die. If they're worried about COVID they can isolate.
Can you be specific in the change you want or which debate isn’t allowed?
British Columbia and New Zealand have about the same population, both are rich jurisdictions. BC was relatively open (compared to other Canadian provinces) while NZ was more locked down. BC has dramatically more deaths than NZ.
And then if you compare BC, which was more locked down than various US states, BC had less deaths than them.
It seems pretty clear to me that the "lock downs" worked.
(putting "lockdowns" in scare quotes here because really the only thing BCians were prevented from doing was going to restaurants and bars. You could still go to the grocery store and home depot etc with a mask on)
If you have some other metric well I dunno, but I don't think there's any better metric than deaths avoided.
Also not just restaurants and bars, gyms, the border, etc. were all closed.
Even with the pandemic going on it would have been better to suffer during the pandemic than cause a recession. The same people who were hit by lockdowns would be hit 10 times worse by a recession.
Employment numbers in my jurisdiction are back to normal and thanks to the sort of government intervention we're talking about very few companies went out of business. Where I live everything is pretty much "back to normal."
The government successfully shut down big parts of the economy, kept people alive, and avoided companies going out of business. They did it.
If there is any recession, and it remains to be seen if there will be, it won't be because of local factors, but rather because goings on in China and supply issues stemming from our over-reliance on their manufacturing.