To be charitable, I think they’re saying that risk discussions require, well, discussion.

No I didn’t say that (at least didn’t mean to, am not a native speaker). What I tried to say was that there are always options to reduce the risks even more but we still don’t do them because it would make other aspects of life harder. Currently a lot of people (by design) have the mental and physical fitness to get a driver’s license. We could theoretically up the requirements a lot (think pilots). It would lead to way less cars, less car accidents, more experienced drivers, probably even more car pooling, etc. But it would be at the cost of flexibility for a lot of people and thus we don’t implement that and accept the risk. We could also set stricter speed limits. Think about just halfing all existing speed limits. Of course the streets would be safer but it’s again a tradeoff and we don’t do that because people like to drive fast and accept the risk. Currently most things come down to the fact that we try to reduce risk while keeping the inconvenience cost low but there are limits to this approach - which is fine if everybody understands that this basically means that we accept the risks.

Back to the original topic, the same is true for a pandemic. Of course there are less deaths with lockdowns - but at what cost? Is it worth it that we lock everybody up to reduce the risk?