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Comment by Press2forEN | Hacker News Reader

The choice between being alive and being jobless is a false dichotomy.

May be for healthy, but not for the people with certain underlying conditions like diabetes, high BP, obesity etc. Also even if you are not vulnerable to the disease, you could be spreading this to the others who are even without showing symptoms.

Look at Sweden. They decided to let the people at risk stay home while others go out and about their business. Didn't work out too well for them.

Sweden has about the same per-capita death rate as the US and Switzerland, and lower than the UK, Spain, and Belgium. (See https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/). It's certainly possible that they'd be doing better with more restrictions, but if their strategy is as disastrous as many people seem to think then they'd be at the top of the charts, and they're not.

That sort of proves my point. UK didn't even want to restrict anything. Netherlands, Italy and Spain acted too late. Sweden decides to selectively restrict. In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity and no wonder all these countries are worse off as far as fatality rate goes compared some other countries like Germany or India.

It's just odd that I constantly hear how horribly Sweden is doing, and not a peep about Switzerland.

In US people are willing to sacrifice human life for economic activity

How many additional COVID19 deaths would you accept to avoid a crippling economic depression? If the answer is zero, you are not being serious. If the answer is more than zero, then as Churchill noted, we've established what kind of person you are and are now haggling over price.

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