Gun deaths, drunk driving, terrorism, opioid deaths, suicides -- just compare them to the natural death rate and call it a day. I mean, those ones all pale compared to COVID-19, so apparently they're complete non-issues.
Furthermore, and I can't believe I have to type this: Drunk driving isn't an airborne pathogen. You can't "catch" drunk driving after unknowingly breathing in alcohol fumes from someone in the subway, then suddenly, 10-14 days later, wake up in your car having an accident after having spread some more drunk driving to people you've been in proximity to.
Why would it be "come on man!"? Because we have the ability to ban drunk drivers from the road, which we've done. We however don't have the ability to ban the coronavirus from our lungs, but I'm sure if we did have the ability to do that, we'd just do that instead of … you know, locking everything down.
We're doing what we're doing because it's the only thing we can do. Some countries are trying other things. Some are better prepared than others and can afford to do less radical things. But what every country can pretty much (at this point) agree on is that, left completely unchecked, this will end us. Not just through the disease itself, but through the after-effects of the healthcare system collapsing.
It won't end civilization, it won't be a blip in population growth, but I have a very strong reaction that "pride goeth before a fall" and you shouldn't go and assume that you and everyone you love will be lucky. It wouldn't make sense to destroy civilization or the global economy, but I don't think it's obvious that coping efforts are not worth a few trillion dollars in redistributed wealth and a lot of "nonessential" people staying at home for a while.
From some of the charts and numbers I've seen, about 10 million people in the world die from infectious diseases in an average year. If everyone got COVID-19 and 1% died, that would be something like 70 million. Plus who know how many would die from other causes that could not be treated due to the epidemic. So, what is worth doing to save 70 million people? I don't even know if I want to attempt to answer that, but if you're saying we're going too far, then you should have an answer.
But whatever, I'll attempt to answer myself. In the US, my impression is that liability for a death in civil court, could be on the order of a million dollars, as that's the order of magnitude of what an average person makes in a lifetime. Multiply a million times 70 million and you get $70 trillion. So that puts bailouts and stuff that cost a couple trillion in perspective. Maybe it is in fact coldly rational to try to prevent the virus from spreading?
Of course you don't, it's not even close. That's an absurd degree of sacrifice to make in return for 1/100th of a life. But it's the same degree of sacrifice we would be making in a 3 month lockdown.
Here's the reality: We're trying to stop a pandemic of a highly contagious disease that can overload most countries' healthcare systems and has the potential to kill millions.
Also, putting aside how contrived your example is: yes I fucking would take that deal. 3 months of inconvenience in return for someone's life being saved? You know people fight cancer for years, right?
It would make most sense to compare CoVID19 to deaths caused by disease per year in the USA, as that is apples to apples. I don’t have those numbers off hand.
Edit: https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
The overall rate is roughly the same as the death rate from disease.
1. "New thing X puts us at risk of losing Y lives every day."
2. "We lose Y lives to car accidents every day".
3. "Ergo, X is harmless!"
Except you now have 2Y lives lost every day.
COVID-19 has spread father than you think. It is also more damaging than you think. I'm hopeful the lockdowns won't be too long, and countries will gradually open up rather than all-at-once.
Not only am I low risk, but I've already had the virus and passed it nearly asymptomatically. I'm likely immune. This shit doesn't benefit me in any way.
And while I may indeed, like most people on this site, make a living online; I've stopped working nearly entirely and have been donating my time to work on COVID-19 projects.
In the mean time, I can't see my girlfriend, can't hang out with my local friends (sorry, "bros"), can't do my usual sports, and I still have to support the people in my life who have it much harder than me because they can't work.
So no, I'm not in favour of indefinite lockdowns, but I'm also not in favour of ignoring the problem until it goes away on its own.
Maybe I'm mistaken and you're not on board with that. Is there some definite period of lockdown you're in favor of, where after that period we accept we've done what we can?
I'm also not in favour of vague policies but can you really blame politicians in this case? It's easy to make predictions but nobody really knows what things will be like three weeks from now. What's the point of saying things will return to normal in three weeks if it's not grounded in anything?
That seems like a normative judgement, there's no way everybody you talk to would agree with the exact place you drew the line.