a. You assume we have any control over the numbers. Short of rushing a vaccine and teatments and an Australian style suspension of civil liberties (and one that will continue until such vaccine and treatments can reach at least 80% of the population) there's not much you can do about it. At this point all government efforts short of Australia or communist regime lockdowns or being an island (which isn't possible for us) have failed to contain the thing. So the only thing we can do is try and minimize numbers. And no one is advocating dragging out old people from the nursing homes and throwing keggers for them. Even Sweden had limitations...we just disagree on what's "reasonable".
b. You can't just look at benefit (i.e., lives saved), You also have to weigh the costs. The costs include economics, lives lost due to lockdown, harm on children. We could save lives from car crashes too if we drop the speed limit to 20 miles per hour everywhere and require foam bumpers on cars. So the correct question that you should be asking is if a particular policy can save X lives (knowing that the policy isn't going to get mortality from COVID down to zero) are you willing to do y knowing it will cost z. Math hard.
