I do - however the problem with your analogy is that here, there is no red light
There was a red light. A very big red light, maybe not across the whole country but certainly in the area I have the most knowledge of. When you speak to the people who have direct access to the raw data on numbers of critical care hospital beds, staffing levels, testing capacity, % +ve tests etc.
Passengers on a train cannot always see the red light on the signal, but the driver can and they are the one who puts the brakes on.
In your analogy there is no doubt that applying the brakes is the right thing to do, and there is no collateral damage caused by doing so. That’s the difference....
But the potential catastrophe of blasting through the red light is multiple times that for your car or train driver. Lets take worst case scenario, 2 fully packed commuter trains collide after a driver pass through a red. Potentially what 3000 potential casualties? Some would probably survive. But that is a one off, it happens and is done. In the UK counting back there have been 4 of those 3000 victim crashes in the month of November, and in each case, almost everyone died. What state would the rail industry be in if 8 fully packed passanger trains had crashed in the last month? Because that is what we are talking about, and that is with the restrictions.
And to those who say they are all old people who only had a few months to live anyway. Well the evidence from the first wave does not support that. In week 15 of this year England had a rate of death 36 standard deviations higher than the rolling 5 year year average. The weeks either side it had 28 and 31 respectively. Over the interim 34 weeks (7 months) if the above statement were true, we would have expected to see a sustantial and sustained drop in excess mortality figures as all of those people who would have died, didn't. But this is not what we have seen. There has been no point where we have seen a significant drop off in excess mortality outside the bounds of normal fluctuation, and in the middle of November we were back up at 6.6 standard deviations above the mean. So the vast majority of those people who died in the first wave, would have made it through to at least this Winter's flu season, and no one talking about economic consequences and colateral damage can bring back those lost months.
And to note, I say this as a person who this year has given up: My own wedding day, being in the room for the ultrasound scans of my first child, seeing any of my family members since February, attending the weddings of at least 2 other close friends, meeting my brother's first serious partner, being present as my sports team win the league for the 2nd year running, being present at the homecoming of my 2nd sports team winning the league for the first time in 30 years amongst all the other things that we have all sacrificed on a day to day basis. Yet still, despite all of this, it is the right call and potentially hasn't gone far enough. Why? well because at least I have been able to tell my 94 year old Grandad that if he looks after himself and keeps himself safe, there is a chance he will live to see the birth of his first Great Grandchild and he can even see a picture now, which he otherwise wouldn't have been able to do. His sister-in-law was not so lucky as she left us in the 1st wave.
These untold stories of missed oppurtunites are the real collateral damage in all of this. The economy can be re-built, with the right support those whos jobs and businesses have been impacted can be helped to re-build, re-skill and re-apply themselves. However the lost moments can never be brought back.