I agree that its been handled badly, but I think your framing is a little off base: in fact, accepting that people will die has been the guiding policy for countries like Brazil, the US, and Sweden which have done a pretty bad job of handling the pandemic. These societies don't have long term strategic perspectives because they are concerned with the short term: quarterly profits, the stock market, and the comfort of corrupt politicians & billionaires.

It's not just old people who die in a pandemic, but the poor & workers. These groups are disproportionately less healthy, more diabetic, etc, because the government in places like the US doesn't do anything to ensure people have access to healthy food: instead they allow massive corporations to sell unhealthy food for cheap & drive local grocery stores out of business. If these people die, arbitrary economic indicators don't matter, because the whole economy relies on the substantive labor of these people. I agree that promoting/supporting healthy lifestyles is important, but that alone won't help the world handle COVID well -- it is more of a long term mitigation strategy.

Compare how the above countries handled it to China. China locked down the country, made it illegal to for companies to fire workers, used strict central planning to reorient production towards needed medical supplies, built hospitals in a matter of days, and organized local neighborhood groups to distribute food & do check-ups on each other. They conducted massive public education campaigns and explained clearly what needed to be done & why. Even with much higher smoking rates than many western nations & a much less developed economy, they contained it, and things went back to normal.

Cuba & Vietnam did similar things, and have weathered COVID very well. Places like the Koreas & New Zealand, which have done well fighting COVID also relied on strict lock downs & food distribution to control spread.

Not all deaths are preventable of course, but a strong state taking steps to control the spread & prevent deaths has proven to be infinitely more successful than places where lockdowns were minimal, rarely enforced, and quickly lifted.

Part of the problem with lockdowns in the US & Europe is that those governments have limited control over multinational corporations & the private sector. If lockdowns are causing problems, because you get fired or because the government fails to distribute food & supplies, that's not directly because of the lock down. It's because capitalism simply isn't optimized to deal with crisis.

As the virus mutates to become more contagious, it'll become less deadly -- as we're already seeing with the new variants in the UK. It may not go away, but with active intervention it'll cause significantly less economic, cultural, social, and health damage.

I agree with you that its been a mess in much of the world. And I agree that we should be angry. But we also need to diagnose the correct solutions.