We Will Regret Not Taking the Economic Effects of Mass Quarantine More Seriously

""Shelter in place" laws telling residents to stay in their homes whenever possible are sweeping the country, making it clear that public health concerns—as opposed to worries about staving off economic collapse—have carried the day when it comes to responding to the coronavirus."

This is the first sentence of the article. It then goes on to attack our society for deciding that public health is more important than the economy.

This is straight garbage. The virus will kill, that is reality. We only have a small set of interventions to attack it. The economy can be managed as we see fit. It does not follow the laws of biology or physics.

Posting articles like this is evil and will get people killed.

> With a virtually complete halt of the American economy about to begin, we should enter this phase with full awareness that it wasn't the only choice available to us.

Followed by ... no other choices except the implication less quarantine. And that based on quotes from experts, without sources, narrowly focused on death rates.

Nevermind consequences to overwhelming the health care system or long term damage to survivors.

How is this informative?

There's a 0% chance that the wide variety of predictions would lead hundreds of governments with limited enforcement power to balance it all perfectly.

We're going to have a lot of regrets. Most governments have explicitly (and often at the behest of their citizens) prioritize lives in the short-term over the economy in the long-term. This makes sense, because present-day voters are supposed to control the government, not economists who look at people as anonymous grains of sand in a giant system.