Countries that ease the lockdown before they have a handle on the virus are in for a lot of pain further down the road. Probably more economic damage as well.
Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.
https://www.wfp.org/news/covid-19-will-double-number-people-...
That's a real issue in the developing world; in the developed world the resources exist to buffer the temporary additional low-end economic impact; not doing so effectively is a policy choice (and, in practice, a deliberate active one made when the alternative of providing the aid is presented), not an inherent corollary of lockdowns.
That seems like a pretty sterile way to describe it.
Right now, in the (presumably) developed US, 1 in 5 children don't have enough food, 3x the amount during 2008. That's a result of years of policy choices, but one particularly policy choice caused it to spike. If there's a resource buffer, it's not buffering.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the-covid...
Yes, the policy choice not provide the kind of mass aid (whether directly to citizens or through firms in a way which reasons the mass of the citizenry to protect empmoyment and pay) to the population that pretty much every other industrialized country facing this crisis has, even the ones (like Sweden) without mandatory lockdowns.
The US federal response to COVID-19, both in narrow public health measures and broader, including economic policy, measures (and structurally much of this has to be done at the federal level because of the way state and federal financing works) has been nothing short of mass murder by depraved indifference.
The losses in GDP caused by lockdowns will therefore very likely have a cost in lives in the developed world too.
The choice between "saving people" vs "economy" is a false choice. Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run. People that live in fear of the virus will not consume, and lockdowns reduce the amount of time that the virus is out there.
You can force people to go back to work, but you can't force people to consume.
It might. We're not really sure. Either way, I think OP has a good point. It is not entirely impossible that we do the lockdown, still same number of people die and we also grind economic activity to a halt leading to other kinds of shortages. If this is what will happen, then the lockdown is a would be a bad choice. Sweden actually is banking on this. They might be wrong, but it's not an entirely crazy stance, there is a reasoning behind it.
Given what we saw in North Italy it would have been foolish not to go to lockdown imo.
But with hindsight we might still assess it was the wrong measure.
I suspect we will be debating that for years or even decades.
As for getting a handle on the virus, it's entirely possible that only herd immunity will do that, and the countries delaying that happening with lockdowns are just delaying the inevitable while incurring unnecessary economic damage in the process.