With this mindset and approach the US will continue to have 20 million + unemployed all the way through Christmas.
Nobody who’s talking “reopening” is thinking about the drain on our society that so many dead will be.
This is not a mutually exclusive choice, but “YOLO” isn’t a good risk management theory.
Guess what? Those few million? They won't be contributing to the economy either way, even without the coronavirus - because approximately all of them are over 70.
This virus takes the old and the sick.
So yes, a lot of people talking about reopening have assessed how much economic damage that 500,000-3,000,000 deaths would cause - and it's not much. Arguably, it's negative due to reduced health care costs.
There's a lot of reasons to avoid killing off our old and infirm. But economics is generally not one of them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/...
The press in Netherlands showed the different ways of communicating a "lockdown". Though the actions were often similar, the way it was worded to the public differed quite a bit across countries. E.g. France talked about "going to war" (or something similar, cannot recall exactly). Spain and Italy both had different ways of announcing the same.
Trying to only protect/lock down people in a risk group (70+, plus overweight / lung problems) seems not to have worked. The virus spread already quickly despite a lockdown for all. It'll probably spread more quickly if that wasn't the case.
> "While dealing with a Covid-19 pandemic, we are also on the brink of a hunger pandemic," David Beasley told the UN's security council. "There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of Covid-19 than from the virus itself."
source: google "covid19 famine"
(I've generally seen this kind of not one life argument go hand in hand with the idea that Covid-19 cannot be compared to any other cause of death, for obvious reasons.)
The flu is a recurring problem. We can't avoid it.
COVID is (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (just as the 1918 flu was).
But letting Covid-19 run unchecked is more akin to raising the speed limit by 50 miles per hour. The prudent choice is not to go with it.
Yes, the flu kills people. So do lightning strikes. Airplane crashes. And anvils falling out of windows. None at anywhere near the scale of C19.
There's a balance. I don't claim to know exactly where that is, but I'm confident that "meh, granny's gonna die anyways, and I want to buy stuff and get a pedicure" is a rather ghastly approach to the current situation.
> What mindset? That preserving life is more palatable than making money? I'm ok with that. I'd rather be unemployed than dead.
You can "preserve life" by quarantining every flu epidemic. But this is an absurd argument. At some point the 'preserving life' argument breaks down.
Self-quarantine/shelter-in-place isn't about saving everybody. It's about keeping ICU units below capacity so we don't have more deaths than necessary. It's about giving scientists and doctors time to develop treatment plans.
The flu doesn't threaten healthcare capacity every season. A lot of focus is on the death statistics, but if someone recovers this does not mean they aren't a drain on hospital resources. Quite the opposite, it takes many more resources to nurse someone back to health than if they had died quickly. Corona is more contagious, leads to more hospitalizations as a proportion of those who are infected, and those hospitalizations are twice as long compared to the flu. And yes, it's also more deadly. If a hospital system collapses, then all other causes of death skyrocket. Our hospital system can handle flu without the economy shutting down, it can't handle corona. That's why we don't shut down every flu season.
"Data from China show that 20% of COVID-19 patients, though, are serious enough to get sent to the hospital. That's about 10 times more often than flu. Even though a great many people are hospitalized for the flu — the preliminary data for the 2018-19 flu season is nearly half a million — the rate of hospitalization is far lower: 1%-2% of cases, according to the CDC."
...
"Once a patient with a serious case of the coronavirus is hospitalized, the average stay is 11 days, according to a study based on January data from Wuhan — about twice as long as the five- to six-day average stay for flu.
The additional days mean additional stresses on the health care system. "To take care of intensive, really unwell people can often require two to three medical staff at one time, all in protective gear, for hours and hours," says Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/20/8154082...
Plus bodies. So many bodies. They would have skewed older, but it's completely wrong to say this is a disease of the over-70s.
There are a lot of people of working age who barely survived infection and now have semi-permanent or possibly permanent - no one knows yet - lung damage.
The idea that we could have somehow managed this without any economic damage is pure fantasy. It has no absolutely foundation in reality.
Most critical workers are not over 70, and most do not have long-term health issues.
So yes, there was always going to be economic damage. But that doesn't meant there would have been nearly this much.