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Comment by agarden | Hacker News Reader

That is a reasonable line of thought, but incomplete. How many lives are we risking by tanking the global economy? That seems like it should be a more quantifiable risk. It becomes a trade-off between the amount of lives we can calculate will be lost via our pandemic-prevention measures (and to what degree of certainty) and the number that might be lost without them (and to what degree of certainty).

The trade-off is between loss of lives one way versus loss of lives another way.

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Okay, but you have to look at both sides of it. How many people aren't dying in road traffic accidents that don't happen because of isolation? How many people aren't dying of diseases they won't develop because reduced economic output has also reduced the output of carcinogens and toxins produced by manufacturing that's not being done? And like that - those are just the first two examples off the top of my head; there are more.

I don't see much mention of this among the "back to work at any cost" crowd, and I wonder why. It seems like a pretty obvious consideration.

Exactly this! The WHO estimates that air pollution kills 7M people annually[0]. A really big range of estimates suggest 20-50% decrease in airborne pollutants since the start of the pandemic. Even a 10% decrease, sustained, could save 700k lives/year.

Yes, bad economies harm people. But they also reduce harm. Pointing simply at directionality due to a bad economy is disingenuous.

[0] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200326-covid-19-the-imp...

Now do a calculation that includes a world war with nuclear weapons, because that's what happens when you hit 30% unemployment.

How on Earth do you figure that?

A natural outcome when you have 30% unemployment in the worlds largest economies. Who knows, maybe we will get lucky and it will only be civil wars in China and India with only hundreds of millions dead.

It is quantifiable, however it appears that periods of economic decline are strongly associated with decreased mortality rates, at least according to the best evidence I can find from Nature.

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