The US has had around 8,000 deaths from COVID in the last two weeks.
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...
We shut down cancer screening and gyms for 3 months in Ontario; that’s almost certainly going to kill more people than COVID did.
If there are ~1 million gym patrons in Ontario, then the gym lockdown (which is still ongoing) only needs to decrease a gym patron's lifespan by 10 days on average to be worse than COVID.
Also, I claimed cancer screenings + gyms combined. Hundreds of people get diagnosed with malignant tumors every day in Ontario and those tumors are now 3 months more advanced than they should be (and will be for a long time after the lockdown until the queues for medical care clear up).
At an avg lifespan of 78 years, 100 kids is ~68 million hours. 30 minutes saved a day / 261 days / year for 75,000 people is ~9.7 million hours a year, so after 7 years, it basically free. Except we would never do that because we don't measure human value in hours because the people in power would be free to make some really terrible optimizations.
You are right though, you did include cancers and I ignored it so we can call it a tie.
Edit: and it's not just the gym obviously, we've removed any incidental exercise one might get from work or leisure activities that were locked down too
Those are absolutely moving deaths forward by a couple months at best.
I'd be willing to put money on a fair amount of the rest of the deaths also being people who are pretty ill. Not all, of course.
Maybe not even most of the rest.
But enough to not be a rounding error.
The fact that the numbers don't seem that dramatic yet doesn't mean that measures to slow the progress of the virus aren't important.