People dispute that money and goods should be given up to save lives. Every person having their heart in the right place will answer that saving lives has priority. If it was just that simple. Unfortunately, when done without caution, one might give some people additional years of life while taking away far more healthy years of others. Resources generally are limited. The more resources are directed towards a single objective, the fewer are left for other objectives. Spending more resources in reducing fatal COVID-19 casualties means that fewer resources can be spent on preventing fatal casualties of hunger and other infectious diseases. A country with a partial or complete lockdown sacrifices vast resources while not strictly focusing on protecting people vulnerable to COVID-19. But these resources are missing elsewhere - for example to prevent children from dying around the world. Saving children with vaccinations against, for example, polio costs less than 20 cents per child [1
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Ask yourself: why is the upsetting daily SARS-CoV2 body count not put into perspective with total death cases from the previous day / 7 days / 30 days of the current and last year or last two years? Death is one of the greatest taboo topics of our society. It is inconvenient to think about it, even though every one of us is aware that our life will end at some point. The vast majority of us want that point to be as far in the future as possible. As a consequence, death is usually not very present in the media. That has changed since the massive outbreak of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV2. One obvious effect of this disease is the high media coverage of casualties due to the sickness while other causes of death are still not covered. The lack of comparing the numbers with normal mortality data obviously has an alarming effect, potentially causing mass panic. For example, Sweden has had no excess mortality in the latest available data (week 13) [1] while employing very modest means.