Almost 10,000 people died in Wuhan and many more would have died had they not locked it down.
I don't know of any studies but I can't imagine anywhere near that much dieing from the economy slowing down.
I don't know of any studies but I can't imagine anywhere near that much dieing from the economy slowing down.
I would not be surprised if the death toll from the ensuing recession is higher than from covid deaths. That begs the obvious question, since covid kills mostly old people, but the recession kills mostly young, which is better?
Overloaded hospitals due to covid would also cause secondary deaths.
Ignoring that, the number will be higher than 100,000 if per the CDC nearly all Americans will be exposed
And 100k seems high for 2 some odd million people losing health insurance for a couple of years.
i.e. if we can prevent collapse and it "only" requires a few tens of thousands of deaths, is that worthwhile?
Obviously, as many as would've been caused directly by said economic collapse, minus one.
The reason you can't easily do such math is because it's never a binary choice. It's not a trolley problem with an obvious solution. You can choose to sacrifice the economy to save a thousand lives for each ten thousand predicted lost to the economic downturn, and then do your best to reduce the lives lost due to economic damage. Perhaps you'll reduce that 10 000 to just 500, and then history will say it was worth it.
I know our grocery stores only average about 1 day worth of supplies in stock, plus 1 day of food at home, then it all kind of goes to shit?
From a country's POV, the stability of food production and delivery to stores is critical. Fortunately, both Italy and Wuhan prove that it can be maintained during lockdown.