> 9 million/year have not been helped by donations, that's why the number persists.

I don't know where you are getting with this. As I said, this is at best an independent problem that can (and should) be handled. In reality it's worsened by the pandemic.

> The "per year" number for COVID cannot change now, it's been a year. It is what it is.

Though I think I didn't say the "per year" number would grow now, you are actually wrong for two reasons:

- while it's been a year, the beginning of that year was pretty mild, less deaths per day than during the summer or these days. So as we move the window, actually the per year number will increase. E.g. if you look at the "total deaths" graph on Worldometer [0], you'll see that it ramped up around the middle of October. It accelerated about 2x (but at least 1.5x).

- we got these "wonderful" results with various restrictions. And you are agruing for no restrictions, but you can't prove that no restrictions wouldn't yield much worse numbers.

> in terms of life years lost, is not of justifiable greater concern compared to others

I've already responded to this: it doesn't have to be a greater concern. It's a preventable concern. As far as I can remember, we were talking about vaccinations.

Also, years of life lost changes as the epidemic goes on and as the virus mutates and seem to get more aggressive (which is an affect of breeding it in a large number of humans). And let's not forget again, that the numbers are affected by how much the health care system is overloaded. Young people will die if they can't get into a hospital because too many people get sick at once.

> The argument lockdowns saved lives has been thoroughly debunked [0],

Yeah, I know. The whole pandemic has been "debunked" quite a few times. The first "debunk" I've read was a year ago, when a guy started lamenting that it would just die because of the network effect. It didn't. I've checked one random article from your link. It looks pretty weak. It just says that no matter what, the epidemic wave just stops after 6 weeks, because that's what it does. It lumps together countries like Sweden and Taiwan, which is crazy in its own right, because Taiwan has 11 deaths/30M people today and Sweden had like 8k/7M back in June (IIRC that's when that article was written). Needless to say, with the 3rd wave in Europe, the 6 week rule is out of the window: our 2nd wave (here in Hungary) was in a decline in mid February, when it started to rise, probably due to the spread of the UK variant. Without any change in the lockdown policy. Our hospitals have been full for about 1.5 months now. We've been world leaders in daily deaths for probably a month or so.

Yeah, so the article after just saying that the lockdowns don't do anything, because all countries seem to behave the same, concludes with "well, we certainly need to explain this..." (they seem to read my mind). And then say nothing about it. But they have included this (just to contradict you): "Certainly, a full complete lockdown reduces the spread of the virus."

People forget, that epidemiology is a well established field of science. It's only new for them. If I'd have to guess why the epidemic could start to decline on its own, I'd say that people just shit in their pants after a while and start to keep more distance. This could probably be seen in the mobile tracking data if anyone cared.

The sad thing about the lockdowns and the restrictions is that they work pretty well. If combined with all the other efforts and if people comply. Because in the end that's what matters: what people do. Not what governments say they should do. If you (or any of those authors) care to look at East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, you'd see that it can indeed be controlled pretty efficiently. Not for free, but for a lot cheaper than what most of the Western world ended up with. What they do is the complete opposite of what we're doing and what you re suggesting. Instead of ignoring, they react very quickly and vigorously. Closing entire counties if they found a few infected (that's e.g. what I've heard from a guy living in Thailand - they have 70 dead for 70M). And this allows them to have less restrictions overall. Because math. You can stop it when it's just a very low number or you can fuck around and stop it when you have a lot of dead people, when your hospitals are full. Of course, if you can stop it by testing, contact tracing, light restrictions (no mass gatherings), masks, etc., all the better.

Another piece of interesting (but not unexpected) information is that the economic effects indeed correlate with the number of deaths. [1]

> If you want to continue killing tens of millions per year so you can save the lives of far fewer, you have no standing. Frankly, that position disgusts me.

I don't kill anyone, but you definitely look angry and seem to handle this on an emotional level. Which I get, a lot of people do this but it doesn't help with having a logical argument.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...