I agree with you, every individual making individual choices that are best for them breaks down in the context of a global pandemic, 100%. I do think you miss something though. We all can, do, and should apply a scaled up version of the same framework.

How many additional covid deaths we are willing to tolerate in exchange for something else will vary by person. We vote/act politically to attempt to move towards our preferred outcome. Chosing 0 deaths is likely too costly in other ways to be acceptable for most, and choose to have no restriction with no available protections would likely cause too many deaths to be acceptable to most people. We make similar choices as a society in other contexts. We, for example, have not banned cars dispite the benefits this might bring. Too many people enjoy the benefits of cars too much to accept this trade off.

I cannot blame her for being focused on individual impacts when she had specialized in this from her books. She did call out other individual risks in making this decision. I do think it could be considered a fair criticism to at least not call out the sociatal risk when talking about individual choices in that article… Just not one where it’s fair to say it makes her so evil Satan would be uncomfortable with her in hell. I think it can be hard for us to remember what we knew and where we were back in March 2021.