[mauvehaus]

Even if it's true that Covid most direly affects people in certain cohorts (and I think it's fairly clear that this is the case), the behavior of everyone is still a matter of public health for the reason that people in low-risk cohorts can pass the disease on to people in high risk cohorts.

Part of the "public" part of public health is that sometimes it's necessary to take actions as an entire population to limit the risk to a subset of people with higher risks.

I recognize that there are many factors besides dying of Covid at play here. A lot of people have certainly suffered economically, among a great many other affects, as a result of both Covid and the response to it.

I'm not trying to oversimplify here, but it's also not as simple as "let everybody make the best decision for themselves based on the available data". Which I'll point out we (mostly) didn't have in March and April of 2020.