Great commentary — I'm wondering what you think about this point.

Lives can't exactly be measured in numbers, because we have an irreducible gut reaction to certain kinds of deaths. A terrorist act which kills 3,000 people in an instant inspires more public sympathy than ten times those deaths due to cardiovascular disease. So maybe, in some part of the public psyche, we care more about coronavirus deaths than the structural-level contributors to death that you mention in your article.

On a more objective note: we might say that containing this virus, which in its potential to evolve represents a real unknown and potentially destabilizing threat, makes it so that the tallying of death rates is irrelevant. I have sympathy to this point of view. It would have been reckless to simply excuse the deaths that would have occured without a lockdown, because this doesn't account for the fact that letting the virus spread would also make it more likely to become deadlier.

All in all, I get the sense that your article is directed towards a particular group of people: those you percieve, in their moralizing rhetoric about caring about dying people, to be in some contradiction. But for the reasons I've mentioned I don't think there's a contradiction there, despite the fact that I may share your views about their moralizing.