Do you remember the original plan for dealing with the pandemic? The "Flatten the Curve" strategy that was used for justifying the lockdowns? It was well argued and logical.

1. The disease is highly infectious. Over the course of the pandemic the vast majority of the population will be infected. There's nothing we can do that will have a meaningful impact on the total number of people who will be infected.
2. A certain percentage of people who are infected will recover without medical intervention.
3. A certain percentage of people who are infected will die. No medical intervention will be able to save them.
4. A certain percentage will become life-threateningly ill however with medical intervention they can be saved.
5. If the disease spreads too quickly the hospital system will be overwhelmed. People who could be saved won't be because they isn't enough hospital capacity to provide them with life saving treatment.
6. Therefore interventions to slow the spread are necessary. This was the "Flatten the Curve" strategy. These interventions won't do anything to change the total number of people who become infected over the course of the pandemic but by ensuring that not too many people become sick at the same time we can ensure that everyone who can be saved will be saved.

Over the course of the pandemic we discovered that the disease was going to be a lot less deadly then even the best case scenarios were suggesting. The hospitals were never overwhelmed and based on the information we saw from the Swedish low-intervention strategy they probably never would have been. The problem is that over the same time we seem to have lost any sense of what it is we're really trying to achieve. "Slowing the spread" stopped being about making sure the hospitals don't get overwhelmed and started being the primary goal of the interventions. We don't seem to have any coherent idea on why slowing the spread is actually helpful.