There are definitely people who think both of those things are true, but you could also argue that the economic damage would have been the same and also that there would have been other costs (e.g. losses to individual autonomy, lost social connections / harms to community, resulting stress and trauma, etc. etc. )
I'm not certain the emotional damage around the deaths would be worse than the emotional damage around the restrictions. Same with the economic damage, I'm entirely certain the the economic damaged caused by the death of a large amount of largely economically inactive persons would have been way less than the economic damage caused by forcibly shutting down large chunks of the economy.
The whole 1 vs 2 thing is just a matter of how much must the whole suffer for the benefit of the few?
More people would have lost their jobs and houses, and whatever recovery was experienced would likely have taken longer and not been as "complete" (not that it was complete anyway, and it took far too long because of spending wimps in Congress). More businesses would have failed, and not restarted.
If the worst-case, or even most-likely scenarios had llayed out then the wealthy would have lost a lot and the poor and middle-class would have lost everything.
Maybe, but "economic impact" is an extremely vague measure that some analyst just guessed. People obviously found alternate transportation paths or were dealing with their own damage at home anyway. ...but maybe it's correct.
That is heartbreaking for sure. I think OP is trying to say or raise the possibility that the alternative could be much worse on a population level scale. I certainly have the same question but no background in this area to know myself.
It might be worse. But I dont know how anyone can weigh destruction of one life vs ruining thousands of people's lives (or at the very least increasing the general angst among society at large).
Mass loss of money, while not as direct a cause and effect, can be far more lethal. People not going for checkups they can no longer afford. People scaling back budgets resulting in less healthy choices. People forgoing using costly medication. People moving to cheaper (and less safe) neighborhoods due to money lost. The general increase in stress with the money lost.
Far harder to measure but magnitudes greater damage.
To play devil’s advocate — a not insubstantial amount of the economic damage is self-induced. We could accept some degree of risk and the associated consequences to reduce that, but we have not for various reasons that are subject to debate. I suspect in hindsight we’ll find we have overreacted due to a lack of good information.
Were the losses worse? Yes, workout a doubt? People died. Pets died. Homes and water mains were destroyed. People have to boil their water. Having power wouldn't have prevented all that but it definitely would have prevented some.
This analysis won’t work well because people will compare the what happened to the what happened. “It wasn’t worth 100,000 deaths to kill the economy” will be the stupid refrain.
Never mind that what kind of economy would we have had with 2M deaths and bodies buried in Central Park?
I think that is a matter of perspective. If you phrase the damage done by a storm in terms of dollars (as opposed to, say, lives lost...), then I think that opens the door for comparisons to other things that destroy wealth.
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