Armed protesters demand an end to Michigan's coronavirus lockdown orders

[spat]

This pandemic is forcing the country discuss tradeoffs. There is no free lunch. If we want to eradicate the virus we need to shut the entire country down for a month. However, that is simply not possible - people would starve to death if the country was shut down for a month. So there is a trade off between social isolation/economic shutdown and overall public health. I am not certain what the correct course of action is. However I don't villify those that want to remove restrictions and get the country back to normal. No one wants to see people die. Yet how much economic damage has to be inflicted before people start questioning the shutdown orders?

Even a total lock down for a month would not have a material change in the number of people killed.

If that worked, we could eradicate all infectious diseases by doing a planned version.

Even if you locked everyone on the planet up with the threat that anyone found outside would be shot on sight, the disease would immediately reappear once the lock down was lifted, and would quickly spread again ultimately infecting just as many people.