As gruesome as it is, there is someone who's job it was to figure out the value of a human life and the dollar cost of the care involved for patients. Someone ran the numbers on how many people will be asymptomatic, how many people will require minimal care hospitalization, and how many will end up in the ICU. ICU cost on average will run around $140,000. Low care hospitalization around 10-15% of that. Funeral costs are $10k+, lost revenue in taxes from deaths =
I don't think there are very many people that want to sit home and earn $1200 deflated dollars to sit home on their asses, but its pretty tough to justify working at your $8/hr job at walmart when the statistics say you have X% chance of ending up with a lifetime of crippling hospital debt that'll become a financial burden on taxpayers when you can't pay.
You also have to factor in the potential economic damage that could come from not having a controlled shut down of the economy.
What happens to an economy when a country runs out of hospital beds while daily death count is increasing exponentially? Do we not just end up in the same situation for a longer period of time with way more deaths from both the virus and overwhelmed hospitals? I don't think that's an unrealistic scenario.
In other words, shutting down the economy may have been the best thing to do for the economy.