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Comment by traitsnspecs | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people will die from the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown. I wonder how many lonely older folks will wish they were dead now that they can no longer receive the few visitors they had.

I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.

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Older folks? I have a mid 30's coworker who used to get most of social activity from the office and tech events and meetups (which is bad for a whole other set of reasons) but even from our fairly active work and friend group chats and you can tell he's really feeling the loneliness and depression.

He started drinking more during the week and has mentioned several times that he is very sad and can't wait for this to be all over. I know that there are thousands of people in the exact same scenario.

I come to observe suffering in people on the other end of the spectrum - the social butterflies that are like caged wild animals nowadays. Calling acquintances left and right was ok for the first two weeks or so, but as the quality of the discussed subjects dwindled and with it the frequency of social virtual interactions, there's a clear sign that the self-isolation feels more harsh for extroverted people.

Our company instituted a smart policy that only management need come to the office because they tend to be extroverts unlike the ordinary developers

You shouldn't be downvoted. The economy is not some abstract separate thing that can stopped and started at will. A prolonged economic depression will kill people just as surely as the virus. They will die deaths of despair from suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease over months and years but in the end they'll be dead all the same.

Governments can mitigate the problem to a limited extent through temporary measures like giving people money and halting evictions, but that will only help at the margins.

Older folks seem to be having the most polarized reactions, to be sure. My mother is terrified and letting her next-door neighbor do her shopping for her so her contact is limited to a single person. There's certainly no consensus among older people that they want to take their chances for the sake of the economy.

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