If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.

There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.

My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.