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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we're going to know in just 10 years. Maybe 50, or 100.

For myself, I definitely sense that we (collectively, or nation by nation) could have followed various pathways (and to some extent, we did). The "right" answer was (and is) not known, and we had a choice between erring on the side of caution over the damage caused by the disease versus that caused by economic disruption.

For now, I'm still in favor of erring in the direction of caution over the disease impact, but will concede that history may judge things quite differently.

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The really thorny issues is that erring on the side of caution over the disease impact means that we are avoiding COVID cases at the expense of millions of undiagnosed / later-diagnosed cancer cases, and many other diseases.

That’s just a piece of the all cause mortality due to the COVID response.

And then after accepting all that direct cost, then you can start evaluating the economic damage on top (which to some extent is unavoidable regardless of lockdown policy).

Even though recessions cause loss of lives(as they always do), I'm not arguing we value the economy over lives. The economy will bounce back as it always does. I'm arguing that we should value all lives. We're only valuing covid lives over other lives right now. Meaning we're valuing our grandmother and great grandmothers lives over our brothers, sister, mothers, fathers even children. To be frank we have to look at average years of life loss with Covid. Let's call it how it is: The quarantine should just be called the life exchange.

Economies do not always "bounce back". In fact, after the major economic impacts of the 20th century, most economies worldwide required gigantic public policies targetting their rebuilding to reemerge, and even that tended to take many, many years.

With something so artificial as this lock down I'm sure it will. We basically removed millions of jobs from the economy on purpose.

But we didn't remove the requirement to pay rent/mortgages on the real estate used by the businesses that shut down, or make the loan payments on the loans that they took out. Consequently, oodles of small business are simply going to fail.

I'd love to believe that you're right (and 3 months ago, I felt the same way). But I just don't.

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