I think you should re-read the comment I replied to originally. The part about "it looks like a lot of people couldn't care less about the lives of others" is more or less a direct quote from that where spiderfarmer said:
"It seems a lot of people can't care less about the life of someone they don't know."
and my whole point was that this can be turned around exactly - people who treat shutting down the economy as if it were a trivial, obviously good thing to do don't appear to care about the lives of others who they don't know and who will be seriously negatively affected by that. As exemplified by the comment about how "Some people will kill someone for a couple of bucks".
So that's the opposite of a straw man!
They're consulting with experts and people on the ground to make and update those determinations
Unfortunately they really aren't. The only people with expertise in command economies (which is what our economies have suddenly become) know they always result in ridiculous outcomes. The shutdowns aren't some hyper-precise expert driven brilliance: they're shambolic, chaotic and riven with extremely stupid results.
Here in Switzerland I went to the supermarket the other day. You can buy many things there, but the toy shelves were covered, with a sign saying you're not allowed to buy them. There's no health justification for that because the people are in the supermarket anyway. And for the millions of parents stuck at home with bored kids, toys are rather important. Instead this is a side-effect of the way the law is written - it bans sales of particular goods, not openings of particular types of stores. They could have phrased it differently but then of course every store would start selling vegetables so they could remain open. Regardless of how such a law is written you get nonsensical and frustrating outcomes with no health justification.
In the UK the government is supposed to be buying essential items like PPE. Instead it's flailing around in a swamp of incompetence:
- Politicians are causing diplomatic incidents by claiming orders weren't dispatched but
- Those same orders weren't actually submitted to the sellers days or even weeks after it was claimed they were
- Private companies with PPE in UK warehouses are shipping it to other European countries, because the government didn't bother to actually buy it after import
- When equipment is ordered, it's bought from dodgy suppliers who routinely ship wrong or defective items.
You can find news stories about all these events in the British press.
We're living in a world where governments can't reliably purchase gowns and masks or make an exception so toys can be sold in supermarkets, let alone evaluate the tens of millions of products and firms to decide what's essential and what's not. Even conceptualising the size of such a task is beyond them. The idea the shutdowns are coordinated by experts on the ground is a pleasant dream, but sadly not real.