Because you get depressed if you are isolated and you get depressed if you have to fear to get infected. There is no undepressing way to handle the pandemic, only ways with less infections and deaths.

Single deaths not mass deaths. And it's social distancing not isolation. The whole lockdown nobody I know was isolated even if in quarantine.

BTW it's not social but physical distancing. You can be as social as you want, just not so much physical contacts.

Don't expect me to use your euphemisms. Even if you, personally, don't need real human contact.

Mass deaths aren't particularly more traumatizing than individual ones. You don't know these people anyway.

The way to solve it was to accelerate vaccines even more than we did. A couple trillion dollars to accelerate vaccine production and rollout (and approval) to cut 6 months off the pandemic. Avoided the big wave in December. We already did better than some feared with vaccine roll out, but we could have done even more.

Also, a harder (but shorter) shut down and a firmer masking requirement and really good test and trace and quarantine protocol were additional ways, but apparently not feasible due to having to heard so many cats. Vaccines were more under federal control and could have been accelerated.