Most of my friends--who aren't in tech, but are still better off than many--are now without jobs; soon they will not be able to afford food; if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you are already pretty screwed right now... like, I am seeing people begging for jobs on Facebook right now, so they can eat. If you are incapable of even having the discussion about whether 2% of people dying is better or worse than 25% of people going hungry for months, how can you make any claims about suffering? Our economy is unjust and unfair, but likening the existence of all of these jobs with some abstract number is "dangerously stupid" and kind of indicates you don't actually care at all about "human suffering". :/
This is really the crux of the matter. Discussions right now seem to be one-sided -- dominated by immediate epidemiological models of human harm -- but it may well be that the long term effects of massive prolonged unemployment ultimately cause more human harm, possibly even more deaths (due to depression, substance abuse and other illnesses of despair, secondary effects of crime, secondary effects of homelessness, possibly starvation/malnutrition in some parts of the world, etc.).
I don't know what the answer is, but I hope that policymakers are weighing the big picture here and considering econometric models as well as immediate medical ones.
This disease is overwhelming hospitals. If hospitals are overwhelmed then patients with any disease or trauma have higher mortality and morbidity. The mortality rate of COVID19 is not the problem, the problem is the hospitalisation rate.
I think it's healthy to question the efforts taken to deal with the virus. I'm not arguing for or against the quarantines, but I do think people need to be aware of the tradeoffs being made.
To save the maximum number of lives will require shutting down a substantial portion of the economy for 18 months until a vaccine is ready for distribution. This could save more than 2 million additional lives by recent estimates. There will also be substantial damage, and not just in terms of returns for shareholders. Livelihoods, retirement savings, and marriages will be destroyed. Lives will be taken by depression and unhealthy habits developed. This is going to be a very tough burden to bear.
