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Comment by smattiso | Hacker News Reader

What lives are being ruined exactly? Some accountant for GrubHub who misses his paycheck? People still have food lodging etc, it just sucks that our "economy" is dependent on 100% of the working age people working 100% of the time otherwise ... collapse? Let's save the lives we can and keep the lights on. Society will be fine.

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If you don’t think lives are ruined you need to get off your high horse. Not everyone is a software engineer that can WFH. Service industries are being hit hard, restaurants, hotels, airlines, etc. Even manufacturers like auto makers are shutting down. How do you suppose these affected people pay their rent.

And when we get kicked into the man made depression two weeks from now, anyone that doesn’t already have savings and wealths, their lives are ruined.

And that’s gonna be much more than 1 or even 5 percent of the population

It's highly unlikely those losing paychecks now will be starving on the streets since measures are being considered about missing paychecks already and society is not at all in a complete breakdown mode. Supply chains are still running at 100% capacity. Everybody will get fed.

However, if hospitals are completely overrun with uncontrolled spread, along with virus related deaths (1% to whatever), normal hospital cases of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, accidents etc will result in straight death too. Health services were already struggling to cope with those cases alone before the virus hit. Total death toll would be an almost guaranteed disaster. Any economic downturn of lockdown will seem a barely perceptible blip atop that body count. Lockdown naysayers need to get a grip on reality.

The only thing we've seen so far on the federal level is a measly one-time payment that won't even cover rent for most people who are out of a job. If that's setting expectations of how "everybody will get fed", mine are very low already.

How much savings exactly do you think most Americans have? Income just dropped to zero for most local businesses, and will be at zero for months. Congress is talking about giving everyone either $1000 or $2000. Yay!

I'm here stressing about finding toilet paper. I'd hate to be worried about affording toilet paper.

I live in what I would call a working-class area. Lots of contractors, plumbers, retail workers, restaurant workers, and gig workers. Most of them don't have a lot of savings and a month without work would really mess up their lives.

If you think a month without work would mess up someone's life, imagine how much dying would mess up their life. Most of us have lived through 2+ major recessions. They suck, but I'd gladly take a recession instead of the deaths of myself and/or love ones.

Most of those people would not die if they got the virus, which is central to my point. That's the trade-off we face.

So what if it was Ebola? Should we still allow air travel? Cruise ships? etc. People will self regulate to a certain extent but the idea that we kill a bunch of people so we can engage in more or less meaningful activities is pretty dumb.

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