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Comment by guygurari | Hacker News Reader

> In 100 years, the only footnote for 2020 will be all the deaths and suffering that this caused. No one will care that you were sad because you couldn't see your friends or go do sports.

It's weird. Why do you empathize with victims of the disease but not with victims of financial hardship? Do you not see people suffering when looking at hour-long lines at food banks and historical unemployment numbers?

Perhaps what will be remembered is the pain of those who were plunged into deep poverty in a New Great Depression that will take us years to recover from.

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I definitely empathize with victims of financial hardship, speaking as one! I have zero income right now, and I am not sure where I'll land at the end of this. But financial hardship is solvable -- food, housing, etc. can be handed out. You can't hand out extra lives to victims of the disease. The US government is literally printing trillions of dollars.

In my first-world country, most people I know are either: - working from home, otherwise normal - got laid off and are receiving government income, which is pretty modest for doing absolutely nothing. - working with reduced pay/hours, which is subsidized by the government.

Are people starving? Are people dying on the streets of malnourishment? I don't see that happening.

People are dying in hospitals due to a disease. That pretty much trumps everything else that isn't killing people.

I am sorry to hear you’ve lost your source of income.

> But financial hardship is solvable -- food, housing, etc. can be handed out.

That depends on the size of the handout. At the scale we’re talking about, I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s that simple. It is also without a successful precedent.

> Are people starving?

I don’t think so, but we also know that many people in the US live practically hand to mouth. By now, millions of Americans are probably without any savings or income. See the long lines at food banks for evidence. I expect that the longer this goes on, the more Americans we will see become poor, homeless, and find it difficult to feed their families. I don’t think people will starve, but how will this be resolved? Maybe instead of starving they will go to loan sharks and dig themselves into a hopeless financial hole.

I find it disturbing that you are willing to put all of this aside because you don’t know anyone who is experiencing serious hardship. Do you know anyone who goes to food banks? I don’t, but I know they exist and I don’t want to ignore them and say they will be fine because “we can hand out food”.

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