Agreed, it'd be wrong to tell people it's okay. It's not okay, a lot of people are going to die, and even more people would have died if we didn't take costly measures to stop it. This has been and will be the worst experience of a lot of people's lives, and it'd just be a lie in another direction to pretend that's not so.
What seems to be a noble lie is the apocalyptic mindset, where the coronavirus is literally the only thing that matters and we must never ask if a particular mitigation is worth the cost. Many authority figures are promoting this idea, even though they clearly don't believe it themselves and couldn't formulate effective policy if they did.
> even more people would have died if we didn't take costly measures to stop it.
The example of Sweden seems to disagree with this assumption. They never locked down, and the current mortality is (1,203 / 10,330,000) * 100 = 0.0116%
First case on Jan 31st, no lockdowns, death rate has already flattened. Where is that crazy scary exponential growth?
Sweden as the great success story when it is suffering the same economic devastation as its neighbors but a higher death rate is an interesting argument.
The thing about the lockdowns is that evidence so far indicates that stopping 80% of non-essential economic activities voluntarily is about as bad for the economy as stopping 90+% on a mandatory basis, but it seems that the health outcomes are much better in the latter situation.
What seems to be a noble lie is the apocalyptic mindset, where the coronavirus is literally the only thing that matters and we must never ask if a particular mitigation is worth the cost. Many authority figures are promoting this idea, even though they clearly don't believe it themselves and couldn't formulate effective policy if they did.