Key difference would be the age demographics. Wars are so devastating not only because people die, but it is young people who die. As unethical as it sounds and completely from the perspective of impact on human capital, COVID is far less damaging.
You may not believe that "the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members"; but how dare you say that someone losing a parent or loved one is "less damaging". And less damaging to what? The economy? The economy will survive. Your grandparents won't.
I would suggest you consider toning down your outrage. It's important and necessary to be able to compare and contrast tragedies without devolving into arguments about the incommensurability of human life. Such discussions may appear cold and calculating ("inhumane") but we must have them - ignoring a part of reality because it hurts does not make it go away.
I have seen reactions similar to yours around people unused to discussing issues like medical triage. If we truly want to understand a phenomenon, mitigate its impact, and do the actual most good, we need to be able to analyze and compare things from all angles: social, economic, political, moral, emotional, etc.
So long as such discussions are conducted in a shared context of understanding how weighty and intense these issues are (as it seems to me the parent was doing), they are for the good.
And people were clearly happy to make this trade-off every single day pre-corona. We don't lower the speed limit to 30mph, even though that would almost eliminate every single traffic accident. We don't ban certain pesticides that are really bad for the environment, because they work really well and increase the yield. We allow dangerous jobs where people can be maimed or killed, because someone needs to do it. We allow people to go parachuting, we allow smoking, unhealthy food, we allow people to own and use guns, even though all of these things let people injure and kill themselves and others.
Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessment, we undervalue known risks and overvalue unknown risks, and that's clearly what's going on with the lockdown hysteria, because the response is so clearly disproportional compared to how we're handling similar threats with similar risk profiles.
I haven't seen much discussion about at what point damage to the economy means we can't feed ourselves and medicine stops flowing. I have always wondered if we could "pivot" fast enough to feed everybody if the economy literately died.
I did read somewhere that Australian cities have 7 days of clean water after international shipping stops (in war for example). We are dependent on international shipping for chemicals that clean our water.
In the US the value of a human life is about $10 million, or about $150k per QALY.
Every single developed nation has put a dollar value on human life, and continues to do so, because without it you can't possibly allocate scarce resources like healthcare to achieve the greatest good. It helps save more lives than the alternative strategy you propose, i.e. sticking your head in the sand to avoid thinking about it because it's unpleasant.
What I'm suggesting is that we make sure we have food security, make sure we can provide medial care to the best of our ability, then pay whatever it costs to save peoples lives.
I would pay every sent I have to stay alive. I think most people would. I think the governments should take the same approach.
And yes, sure, most of the time it's super hard to decide what to do, but for this virus, we know all you have to do it isolate from each other for a few months. It's not even that hard.
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As a side note I can't wait till somebody uses that 10m figure and applies it to deaths as a result of obesity. You think social isolation is hard, you should try giving up sugar, now that is hard!
So I don't think he meant economic loss from the event.
Your comment seems to be "cancelling" mine purely on emotional basis despite of prefacing my intentions. God forbid, if I had purely stated it with no warnings.
I agree, it is pretty shitty to thing to say that older people are not as valuable to the society as the young. There is objectivity and truth to it, although it might be unpleasant. I am afraid that this is what's going on in the world today - objectivity takes a backseat, emotional and knee-jerk "cancel" culture prevails. It deeply bothers me.
I would kill him without thinking too hard if it meant saving my nephew, aged 10, from dying. My grandfather lived a full life and I'm sure if he had the choice to trade his life for his great grandchild he'd sacrifice what he has remaining in order to gift the chance at that same full life to his progeny.
On a societal scale we think the same way, an 80 year old dying is less bad than a 10 year old dying, its less tragic both emotionally and from society's perspective, economically. Losing a grandparent is tough, losing a sibling in the prime of their life is terrible, and losing a child is devastating. I can't comment on OP's feelings on the subject, they could have aid it in a callous and inhumane way, I don't know their inner thoughts, but the essence is true even if it is painful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
Obviously, these methods don’t account for the emotional value to loved ones. Maybe they should. Attempts to quantify that could include factors like mental health, and future wages (e.g. losing a parent earlier in life).
There are plenty of elderly who would love nothing more then to continuing to see their children, and their children's children grow up; and who would much rather not die intubated, or worse, suffocating.
Do you really think keeping someone alive in a care home (where most of the deaths occurred) for an extra year or so is the same as someone in tehir 20's being killed?
You seem to underestimate the suffering that the economic damage will cause. It's already predicted that more will die from hunger due to the measures that have been taken than from the virus itself.
WWII had higher civilian casualties then soldiers.
That is not to remove suffering of soldiers, but people here tend to talk about wars as if it did not affected everyone living there.