From the comments:

Listening to this episode, it seemed that the two scholars were of the opinion that the shutdown was ineffective and sought to prove it versus questioning the effectiveness of the shutdown and seeking the answer.

This is like if a patient has appendicitis and the hospital doesn't have enough anesthesia these guys would recommend not using the anesthesia they do have on hand. The problem isn't that isolation doesn't work, the problem is bone-headed people that won't self-isolate. "Honey everyone is dying from that gunman down the road anyway, so we might as well go outside with everyone else and get a good close look."

Two rich Princeton professors who never saw how bad things were in our hospitals, or had friends buried in mass graves, or watched their parents carried out of nursing homes in trash bags saying that the lives saved were not worth the "inconvenience."

Absolutely worth it. If the lockdowns had saved only one life, they would still have been worth it. The people who complained about the lockdowns or wearing a mask were the weak ones. And they hurt and killed others because of their weakness.

Based on the comments I’d say this was a very tone deaf episode. We still are grieving over losses from Covid. Many of us have been changed forever because of what happened. Looking back and judging all of us doing our best as “inconvenient” to some fails us all. It’s a shameful exercise to suggest it wasn’t “worth the trouble” when it is entirely possible we would have had many millions more die. Has everyone sheltered in place for a few short weeks the world would have been free of COVID. Now we are saddled with many millions of frail and immunocompromised people who will forever be stuck with masks because some of us were unforgivably selfish and feel perfectly entitled to steal the safety of others from them for our personal pursuits. It’s a shameful thing.

I loved the lockdown. I thrived.

I betcha did.