Putting my cynic hat on for a moment...
I can guarantee you that insurance and government actuaries have run the numbers many times over. It's their job. There is no doubt that they know how much downstream money is saved for every senior or health care reliant citizen that dies. Spending now is offset by savings later. If millions die, it could be 100s of billions or even trillions saved for every year that they are no longer alive, since they are net negatives to the economic function of society.
Our entire taxation and pension structures are pyramid schemes, requiring constant population growth at the bottom of the pyramid (taxpayers from 20 to 65) to pay for those at the top, who are living longer than ever and draining coffers for many more years than the system was designed for. People's bodies often live longer than their minds, or beyond their quality of life, when prior to the 19th century, they would have been purged from the population at at earlier stage. Nature just handed mankind an opportunity to correct the numbers a bit and stave off a collapse of the pyramid.
Further, this is more or less going to knock back our pollution and carbon emissions back to 60s levels for a few years, maybe more. The actions needed to combat global warming have just been forced on us by nature. The financial savings of not having to go through all the struggles and offset costs have been handled for us by nature. The benefit to the world in terms of the environment will be massive, unfortunately it will be the developed nations that benefit from these savings and the harder hit developing nations that were counting of carbon offset money to come in will be left in ruin.
Imagine for a moment if the WHO made the decision to delay action *on purpose* to allow this to happen? Imagine if over a period of 3-5 years this removes 5-10 percent of the (mostly) weakest among us? It's insane to imagine, but nature will have done for us what we would be unwilling to do ourselves. Then if you take that further, and think some in the government or CDC may have had a similar thought and decided that a delay in action could cause these things to cascade into a place that would ultimately be for the good of the world (in their mind, of course).
As stupid as he was to say it the way he did, Trump is not actually wrong when he says that millions die in car accidents every year and the world does not stop turning. It could be they are simply trying to find the balancing point between short term anti-COVID measures with an attempt at normalcy while *allowing* COVID to slowly cull the weakest from the human herd.
It's as though nature has decided to go Thanos on humanity and do things we would never be allow ourselves to do.
I'm not in any way condoning this, but consider it a thought experiment, if nothing else.
/cynical crackpottery
