From a morally compassionate understanding, I would even say (to use the stylistic device of exaggeration/radical formulations) that even if the contagion theory and the one about the immune system were undoubtedly correct, it would still be questionable whether measures taken for protection and defence are not already unacceptable for the sole reason that the defence against danger can only ever be a temporary act, but not a permanent state. Because, no matter how great a danger is, the time to meet it cannot be cancelled, but only postponed.
But postponing it indefinitely, as we are supposed to accept worldwide, is like a never-ending imprisonment, a fixation of the living in the inanimate.

Personally, I have decided not to accept the contagion theory (that is, even if it is true) as true, because I give the higher authority to another circumstance: That life between human beings is impossible if we classify the next person as a perma-danger. This attitude that the other person potentially threatens my life is so destructive that it does not outweigh any possible benefit for me. I can certainly see them: people who have always tended to feel uncomfortable among their species (crowded streets, crowds when shopping, full buses and trains, etc.) feel much more comfortable with the new distance rules.

But "feeling relieved or comfortable" is out of proportion to what is damaged in the interpersonal. Therefore, it is not really an acceptable reason to endure the cuts in everyone's psychosocial life.

I have heard these very statements: "The lockdown was a relief for me" or "it was good to be in quarantine", for me an expression of "since I cannot do anything good for myself, am unable to take time off, I welcomed the forced circumstance of having to do so (I would not have done it on my own). Similarly, people who have had to deal with serious illness say afterwards: "I needed that to get off the pace. I would otherwise have worked myself to death (drinking, gambling, etc. etc.).

And what can I say? Of course they are not wrong. They lived a life of extremes - stress and boredom - until they got sick. The mistake is to think that this form of personal responsibility can be replaced. By external strong events, like what we have been experiencing since 2020.

People try to find all kinds of arguments, rational as well as irrational, it often does not look like a good strategy but I am not so sure if it is always as counterproductive as you indicate it...

Greetings to you.