The economic collapse and scare has caused people to cancel or delay surgeries, dental work, physical therapy, buy newer and safer cars, home abuse has gone up, I imagine exercise has gone down, I wonder how alcohol use has changed.
You can quantify these with numbers.
You can!
Using the age statistics from NY and the Social Security actuarial tables, we're currently losing something like 11.75-17.1 years of life per death, depending on whether you weight towards the life expectancy at the beginning or end of each age bracket. The current update to the "dialysis standard" for the value of a YoQL is $129,000, so we're currently losing $1.5-2.2 million per death.
If the true fatality rate is 0.66% (https://www.livescience.com/death-rate-lower-than-estimates....), and 70% of the population would catch it if it is not contained before "herd immunity" is reached, that would put the total number of expected deaths in the US at around 1.52 million. If we're expected something like 100-200 thousand people to die even with the measures currently being taken, then we're averting 1.4 million deaths and that amounts to a savings of about $2-3 trillion worth of human life.
If $2-3 trillion is suspiciously similar to the magnitude being thrown around for various "coronavirus relief bills", well, it's probably only a little bit of a coincidence.
If you're going to claim that 60+ year lives are somehow less worth than younger ones, you better damn well be 60+ years old yourself. Otherwise you're just talking about sacrificing lives that aren't your own.
People who are 50+ or 60+ are still productive members of society. They take care of children for young professionals, support them with their savings, bond family members that would otherwise do stupid stuff.
Lots of those young people will get psychical issues because their family members died. Like mother, father, grandmother and grandfather died at the same time because of virus. How much that can lead to alcoholism or suicides?
This kind of thing would not happen if there is social distancing in place. This kind of thing like wiping whole family elders at once happens rarely with car deaths.
I think this math problem is easier than we would like, but politically it's unpopular.
I do not see the argument that the resources should go to cars, if you want to solve car accidents you can do it for free, I have the secrets here:
- don't give a diving license that easy. have decent tests
- if you are caught drunk you should never drive again
- if you are caught looking at a phone screen your license is gone for 10 years
- if you are speeding your license is gone for 10 years
- test the cars every 2 years to check they are safe and not polluting
- analyze the crashes find the causes and address them, if speeding is the issue find a way to enforce speed limits.
Do you have any evidence that if the lockdown did not have happened more lives would have been saved? Ironically probably less people died in car accidents so you need to find some domain where the number of deaths increased more then the lives saved,
If they all are now above 50 chances they might die because of this virus are quite high.
That is high price if one is losing his social grounding when he is 20 because he survived... Yeah he might get inheritance and have his young friends but I would not be happy if most of my relatives are dead.
Current global stats as I write are: 1446242 confirmed, 83424 deaths which in my calculator is giving 5% not 0,5%
Second thing is that testing already was increased in a lot of places but last 2 days new cases number did not grow it stayed around the same.