The median age of death from COVID is about 80, and those people have serious existing health conditions. Statistically people in this group will have a life expectancy of about another 5 years. This is not a group that you have to worry about side-effects.
The death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher - from excess suicides, poverty, crime and violence - that anything we can do to alleviate the panic and get back to normal life is worth it.
So what oh what could the government do to alleviate the issues from lockdown? Weird they could give the PEOPLE of the country the bailout money. They could extend the the unemployment credit. Unfortunately they are not thinking in that manner and it will lead to a huge depression which could cause those issues you are mentioning. Although I would like it see some actual stats that say "suicides, poverty, crime, and violence" are actually more deadly than the disease. If people in the United States had been a little less selfish (or didn't think of this as a politics game) maybe we wouldn't still be deep in the midst of the first wave of this with many states losing any progress they made. Our leadership in Washington (all of it not just POTUS) has failed us just to keep the stock market high and all their cronies rich while the rest of us suffer.
Would like to see a discussion about whether it is a false dichotomy.
I mean, in an ideal population set where people acted rationally, it might be. In the real world, where fear motivates counterproductive behavior, it’s hard to imagine a different scenario where you don’t slow the economy (associated harms) while trying to mitigate the virus.
> Would like to see a discussion about whether it is a false dichotomy.
Another topic on HN that showed up today was "any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious," which I would broaden to, as the kids say: "bring receipts." If you're going to implicitly (or explicitly) claim that the harms of a lockdown in response to a pandemic are greater than the harms caused by the pandemic itself, you should at least put a little effort into explaining why, and include at least some links to studies or informed discussion that support your claim. Just backing it up with "the truth of my claim should be clearly obvious to even the most casual of observers" is rarely good enough.
I don't think anyone has seriously claimed you can mitigate the virus's spread without slowing the economy, or that slowing the economy doesn't come with associated harms. The question was and remains what the balance is. Is there any evidence to back up the claim in the thread above that "the death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher?" Higher than what? The projected death toll from no lockdown at all? When someone makes a claim about the economic damage from the lockdown, are they taking into account studies that try to project the economic damage that no lockdown would have caused?
You realize you’re talking about likely more than a million life years lost already? Potentially much more damage when you consider dalys
due to long term sequilae as well.
How much more can we expect if things simply “get back to normal”. Hard to say but obviously a gigantic loss. I’m also highly skeptical of claims that #1 suicide, crime, violence have increased significantly. Source? Poverty/economic disruption is obviously a massive damage that cannot be understated either.
But I’m highly highly skeptical that countries who try to ignore the problem like Brazil, USA will end up economically more successful than countries with strong countermeasures like South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and many others. Beat the virus to fix the economy.
At some point there is an inflection point where it makes sense to “give up” and accept that countermeasures are more costly than the benefit they provide. Clearly every day we delay and have high rates of infection, and the longer the vaccine takes, we move closer to the “give up” side of the calculation. I’m not at all convinced we’ve reached that point yet and we certainly hadn’t reached it at the point the federal administration gave up.
The death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher - from excess suicides, poverty, crime and violence - that anything we can do to alleviate the panic and get back to normal life is worth it.