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Comment by just-juan-post | Hacker News Reader

Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked. Certain discussions are not allowed. Welcome to the coronavirus discussion on the Internet.

Bring up how people are dying and it's terrible? Automatic upvotes. Attempt discussion about the tradeoffs of the lockdown (economy vs lives)? That person is stupid and uneducated and a Trump supporter - automatic downvotes.

It's pointless to even attempt a discussion that isn't simply lamenting deaths. Don't waste your time like I have.

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> Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked

I find that unacceptable so let's talk.

Long story short I think that the economy will pick up again once this all blows over and that whatever negative consequences there are from a lockdown are still better than hundreds of thousands of people dying.

One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101.

I realise now that I'm doing exactly what you were criticizing (lamenting deaths) but I'd really like to hear your counter argument.

Define “blows over”. If covid appeared, today, with its current death rate (about 3x of the flu), there’s no way we would be taken the extraordinary measures that are being taken: shutting down schools, businesses, churches, and in general grossly violating constitutional rights with questionable efficacy.

I see people saying “let’s wait for a vaccine” but what if a vaccine doesn’t appear for years?

How many deaths of despair are worth it?

How many domestic violence cases counterbalance one 70-year-old person dying (the average age of a covid death)?

How many people going bankrupt is worth saving the life of a single person? What if I told you that going bankrupt is associated with increased likelihood of death?

And so on... single-variate analysis of such a complex issue is doomed to fail, but that’s basically all I see.

>>>One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101.

The argument of the anti-lockdown crowd (at least as I understand it) is that the second- and third-order effects are just rich people going bankrupt, but middle- and lower-class people being forced into dire economic straights up to and including starvation, or a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions.

> a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions

Isn't that more of a symptom of a broken healthcare system?

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