[jandrese]

Depends on your goal. If you want to minimize deaths then you don't have a lot of options. If you want to maximize profit then letting people just die is cheaper, assuming you aren't counting medical expenses.

[midoridensha]

Locking people up for a year is probably going to cause many other problems that will lead to early deaths, so I don't see that as necessarily a good way of minimizing deaths. We're already seeing that Covid has disrupted many aspects of peoples' social lives, probably leading to a decrease in the birth rate, for instance, plus causing other health issues like depression.

Just letting the disease run rampant doesn't necessarily maximize profit either: if all your workers get sick and a bunch of them die, that's going to cause a huge impact on your profits, even in the relatively short term, let alone the long term when there's a labor shortage and a decrease in demand.

[jandrese]

You would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of deaths attributed to "being in lockdown", especially when compared against the 6.5 million extra deaths from COVID.

Economists tend to see workers as replaceable cogs, so deaths aren't a major factor until it starts affecting the labor supply. To maximize income in cases like this the best strategy is to get your entire workforce sick at once, take the two weeks off, then hire enough people to replace the 5% that died so you can get back to work as fast as possible. Also, make sure to suspend all health benefits for the two weeks to make sure nobody tries to use expensive hospital stays. You probably think this sounds extreme, but it's a real strategy (apart from suspending health insurance) that some powerful people were very angry about not being able to implement due to government interference.