The mere fact that COVID-19 exists created a shock where no matter what people/governments do, death rates will be higher this year than years past and real GDPs will get smaller. The question is how the impact of various policies would compare to each other in supporting people - it's not appropriate to compare against past years' health or economic statistics, since we can't achieve those baselines.

The truthful answer is we don't really know how various policies would play out - the decision to shut everything down is informed by a fairly easy to quantify metric (how many people were infected/died because of this disease), while disadvantages of this policy are harder to quantify (second and third-order impacts like how will it impact unemployment, substance abuse rates, crime rates, divorce rates, suicide rates, domestic violence rates, health impacts of delayed elective/preventative medical procedures, negative impacts on student learning/achievement, medium-term impacts on industrial organization and monopolization/the loss of small business, marginalization of lower-socioeconomic classes (and people in less developed countries), broader impacts of quality of life for the non-infected, etc.).

A well informed discussion about what policies to adopt would include analysis of all of these types of factors - the fact that the only statistics most governments seem to be focused on is infection rates is reminiscent of watching young children play soccer - i.e. everyone running after the ball. Perhaps the right policy decisions for society are being made, but it's understandable that discontent is going to be widespread with people who are acutely witnessing/experiencing second and third order impacts of the policies with no end date in sight. The unfortunate reality of the situation is if these policies continue in the medium term, they will likely result in social unrest which may be more harmful than the virus itself.