I think an important thing to bear in mind is that we don’t have a choice. There seems to be a misconception that if we don’t bother with a lockdown and just carry on as normal, just with a bit of social distancing, that we can accept higher deaths but save the economy. We can’t. A study of the economic effects of the Spanish Flu shows that cities which locked down hardest and earliest actually suffered less long term economic impact than cities that didn’t[0].

There’s no such thing as an option to “choose the economy”, the Spanish Flu shows us this. Aside from the millions of deaths this could lead to, and completely crushing the health care system, there would also be many tens of millions of people sick and unable to work, plus many tens of millions of people stuck caring for them. A lot of people would choose to stay at home anyway, especially as the carnage reached its peak. There’s just no way for the economy not to take an existentially threatening impact.

This article is shocking, and I believe it’s right, but we need to buckle down and make some really hard choices about how to tackle this thing. However long term I am an optimist. The work force should largely survive and our capital investments still exist. We’ve got used to historically very low inflation, but a dose of inflation over the next 5 to 10 years could actually give use the the flexibility to spread out and absorb the costs across the economy and society. As a fiscal conservative I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there it is.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/pandemic-economy-less...