Every life has value, I don't care whether the person is young, old, fat, thin, or whatever. I don't want anyone to die early. Because I don't want anyone to die early, I would like it if we did things which reduced the risk of that. This means that the restrictions we put in early in Australia were good, but now they are less good - because we're saving a few lives from the virus at the cost of hundreds of lives from suicide, overdose, cancer and heart disease.
Unfortunately, and this is present everywhere but one of the biggest biases out there is the effect from action vs the effect from inaction. I feel mustachians are uniquely away of it since it's tied to opportunity cost, and a sort of "pathway analysis" where you say if I go down this path, where does it get me, and if I go down this one where does it get me, then compare the outcomes.
End the lockdown and kill a few hundred people? Murderer! Those thousand or whatever suicides and ODs that never happened, so most people will simply look at it as 200 poor dead grannies. This is triply true for governments and companies who have public relations to worry about. "How do you *know* you saved a thousand people? You don't *know* that!"
This was also true for areas in Canada here that are particularly hit with hard drugs. A certain subset of very enthusiastic addicts would constantly OD, need ambulances, hospital stays, detox, whole nine yards - at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a trip, dozens of times a year, only to do it again when the next cheque came. They tried a program where they gave these people free apartments, nurse visits every day, basically held their hand the whole way to stay sober and have a little bit of a normal life. The cost was significant for an apartment and lots of nurse time, but significantly less than all the hospital resources they were using up, not to mention the increase to the quality of their mental and physical health. It was a win all around. However, there was outrage from the public. "Why are we giving these worthless addicts free homes and nurses?!" Same story. It was a smaller cost by action, vs a much bigger cost by inaction. I think maybe because the active cost is certain, and the passive cost is uncertain. But what most people can't be bothered to look at is that like insurance, statistically with big groups their behavior as a whole will be quite predictive. It would likely be the case with the foregone suicides down there, but I still think it would be a very hard sell.