> Heck, we already decided trashing the economy is worth "saving lives" (how many?),
People dropping dead in the streets will trash the economy.
People dropping dead in the streets will trash the economy.
I'm totally in agreement with you.
The pain of economic loss is processed in the emotional and reward centers of the brain. Empathy and compassion, on the other hand, are processed in advanced sections of the brain in the anterior prefrontal lobe. When we are encouraged to think about the stock market all the time, then the emotional centers are allowed to take over, and we forget that people are what's important.
People die all the time. Pretending that the jury is out on the long term impacts of Covid 19 is ascientific.
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The issue when talking about the long term affects is that, you're right, we don't have enough information. However that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands and do nothing.
The whole point of humans recording history (and science is mostly just trying things and writing them down so we can build on this knowledge later) is to see patterns and conclude things.
There's all kinds of misinformation that can spread in the cracks here because only history will tell us the real truth, but drawing on similarly infectious diseases from history will help significantly.
It's not 'ascientific' to draw from the corpus of scientific knowledge. It is ascientific to say: "This disease is completely unknown so we should wait until the human death toll has reached critical mass before making an action which could impact our wealth".
For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.[0]
In case you forgot, economy is the quantity and value of transactions in a market. Less people is lower quantity.
From the admittedly little we know about the disease, it is much more deadly than anything that's currently making the rounds. (If you're going to rebut me please control for number of people infected, because it's a common misconception that "more people die of other things" but that's because "other things" are affecting more people)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_consequences_of_popul...
First of all, everything coming out in the news recently should cure you of the illusion that we have any idea about the number of people infected. Estimates of an undercounting of a factor of ten in the early days in New York. An aircraft carrier with 60% of cases being completely asymptomatic. Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
It's interesting that you use the precautionary principle only towards a virus but not towards a wide scale social experiment on an overwhelming majority of the population.
The elderly certainly contribute to the economy, but if you're pretending that it's anywhere near the impact of something like global unemployment in developed countries hitting 10%, you're being obtuse.
Your description of the economy is rudimentary and shows disregard for things like organizational capital which are vital to an effective economy.
And finally, the corpus of scientific knowledge is one thing -- attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
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First of all, even if the true mortality rate of covid-19 were 1-2% (it isn't, it's likely much lower), it wouldn't infect 100% of the population.
You can't just do [total confirmed deaths] / [total confirmed cases] to arrive at a mortality % and then multiply by the total population to get a death count. That's horribly biased and not grounded in reality. The current estimated fatality rate is biased in my opinion as it mainly selects for people already in hospitals. Research is indicating that [total confirmed cases] may be much, MUCH smaller than [total cases] [0]. People are getting it and recovering without every being tested. Some people (a lot of people?) have mild-to-no-symptoms.
Look, it's reasonable to want to prevent excessive loss of life. But it's a double edged sword. Mortality rate for people aged 20-30 is estimated at .2% (though it'll like turn out to be lower for healthy adults). Prolonged stay-at-home orders have driven up suicide rate though (not to mention the devestating damage to people's livlihoods). 2 graduating seniors recently committed suicide at the Air Force Academy presumably related to covid-19 lockdown orders, and with a class of ~800, that's already more deadly than covid-19.
You're right we shouldn't "sit on our hands", but we also shouldn't fall victim to the politician's fallacy [1]
[0] https://news.usc.edu/168987/antibody-testing-results-covid-1...