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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Everyone dying destroys everything. I'm not sure saving a cafe is worth thousands or millions of deaths.

People work at that cafe and use their income to feed and house their families, and to provide them with healthcare.

Don’t be dismissive of these concerns, they are very real.

Which is exactly why social safety net programs exist and continue to function during these times. Not to mention the checks that will be mailed out to every taxpayer soon.

We can and should essentially shut down the country

We don't have a safety net that can feed the whole country. Some people still have to work to actually grow the food, do the distribution, and feed everyone. How is that going to happen if everyone sits at home for 2 months?

I partially own, while my parents run, a cafe that's pretty fucked. I'm incredibly aware of these concerns. I just think that health comes before economy. Without healthy people, you don't have an economy.

What about 97% healthy people. Is that sufficient for an economy?

> I just think that health comes before economy.

I don't think we can make such a blanket assertion. The US markets have lost 10T in value over the past month. If the virus infects 70% of the US population with a 2% mortality rate, 4.2M ppl will die. It's obviously not so simple, but we're sacrificing $2.4M in market cap per life saved. At some point, the tradeoff makes no sense in light of the fact that we could invest in life saving technologies/solutions that save more lives down the road.

Are you saying 4.2 million people should die?

Yes, I'm saying at some point we should make the choice between a lot of people dying now and even more people dying later.

~57 million people die every regular year for whatever reasons

Even doubling that does not "destroy everything"

I think that an extra 57 million people dying is devastating, and we should do everything in our power - even if it means shutting down restaurants - to prevent 57 million needless deaths.

Problem is the current plan will not save 57 million people. Not even close. The mortality rate will still be 3.6% and we still expect 70% of the population to get infected.

So if it was as simple as you say, then sure. Let's shut it all down. But shutting it all down is not going to save us from Covid19.

Similarly, shutting down non-essential jobs for a couple of months does not destroy everything.

But the death rates suggest everyone won't be dying, so we needn't ascribe too much concern to this outcome.

But infection rate being so high when left unchecked means the small % of deaths could be hundreds of thousands or even millions all over the world. Also Italy almost had a death rate of 8% yesterday which is huge.

Plus when hospitals get overloaded, patients needing critical care for problems other than covid-19 will die as well.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese...

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