Your whole argument relies on the faulty notion that the lockdown prioritizes "saving lives" over the economy.
This simply isn't true, and I'd argue that lockdown will directly or indirectly kill more people than it will "save".
In other words, saving economy is about saving lives, and less to do with "profits".
And then it becomes a matter of who gets to decide which set of people dies - "the old and the weak" or - in arguably greater numbers - everyone else (while their liberties get stripped away in the process).
Mind you, lockdown doesn't solve the problem, but only slows it down, namely the amount of people it will save is arguably rather small compared to numbers of people who will die from the economic damage.
The downsides are of different characters - lockdowns will have a bad but generally predictable downside in the field of economy, whereas not locking things down will have an unpredictable downside where lots of people - how many we do not know - die.
During the Great Depression, death rates went down, so it doesn't seem very substantiated to claim that lockdowns are going to kill people.
> Seeing that doing nothing will likely lead to lead to millions of deaths, how would the lockdown possibly kill more than that?
The lockdown is wasting months to years of billions of people's lives. That has to be equivalent to some number of deaths, hard to quantify how many, but it's greater than zero.
Also, a bad economy literally kills people by starvation albeit in foreign, poor countries that don't have food surpluses or the ability to print USD.
Yes, exactly. If the lockdown and the subsequent recession decreases the life expectancy of the average person by 0.5%, then the policy is already a net negative. Add the massive wealth destruction on top of that and the picture becomes even murkier. We, sadly, live in a world where lives can be saved with relatively little effort. Clean water, malaria nets, nutrition. If we wanted to prevent those unnecessary deaths we easily could. And now we're settings trillions on fire without even thinking carefully about the humanitarian consequences.
Economic effects are still going to exist. This is a tautology. What matters is the change or trade-offs in effect from taking one course of action or another.
We have over 20 million unemployed (probably a significant undercount) through a self-inflicted lockdown in just a couple months. Leading economic experts such as the US Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve have warned strongly of “permanent economic damage” if we continue the lockdown. I would speculate this lockdown is firmly ushering in the next era of “essential” mega corporations and the utter destruction of small business.
And in New York, the majority of new cases in the last few weeks have been from people “strictly observing social distancing.”
Like focusing a laser increases the energy that can be brought to bear on a single point and magnifies the overall effect, so too can highly targeted common sense measures save more lives than this “utter bullshit” general lockdown.
I’ll give the specific example again. While we’re doing ~30k tests a day nationwide, we still haven’t tested every nursing home patient and worker. In fact, NY Times reports many nursing homes have not gotten access to barely any testing at all, even for their recently deceased. So a sub-population of 1.3 million residents is bearing 35% of total fatalities (in 14 states it’s more than 50% of all fatalities) and this lockdown diverts massive resources and energy away from saving those lives.
Do I have that right? 0.4% of the population has seen 35% of the total deaths? Over-represented by 87x. By the way that’s an undercount because only 33 states actually break out data for nursing home deaths. But instead the political response is fear mongering, preaching a new normal, and shaming people who go to the beach.
Yeah, this is a false dichotomy. There are other options other than lockdown vs no lockdown. You can have a social safety net and pay people to stay home. But if you're insistent that these are the only two options, look at Sweden. Their economy suffered despite not locking down last year because guess what, it turns out people don't want to go out and risk dying. So if your economy is doing to have mass unemployment, you may as well do that and avoid the death and injury. Or better yet, borrow at low interest rates and let people be unemployed but not destitute.
These studies all assume that there wouldn't be a recession without a lockdown. This is fallacious. Even without a lockdown, consumers are going to stop going to large events, restaurants, movies etc when they see that it causes death...
> Trading the lives and senses of anyone to watch numbers go up in a spreadsheet is despicable.
Yet this is what we all do every day, from traffic to food safety, to public spending on health care, etc.
These sort of trade-offs exist everywhere. Every single time you take a flight or step in a car you are literally contributing to the death of people. None of this is hugely controversial, except ... in the case of COVID.
And it's not about "numbers", during great economic recessions quality of life does decline, sometimes greatly so. IMHO "destroy the economy", "destroy the lives of children", etc. is hugely overstating matters, but it did have a negative impact on many aspects.
Were lockdowns a good or bad trade-off? You can reasonably disagree on that. But to deny the trade-off exists in the first place is unhelpful.
a) economic depression will directly or indirectly kill people
b) lockdown doesn't "solve the problem" - it merely slows it down
We can argue all day about exactly numbers of how many people will get killed by the economic damage, but if you want to take away rights and opportunities for people to provide for themselves and their families, the onus is on you to prove that the lockdown will save more people than it will kill.
And at the end of the day - it's still a question of which set of people is going to die - whatever those numbers might be.
your post has just as much hubris. you seem to be suggesting the no lockdowns would have no impact on the economy. There are plenty of knowledgable people that believe the impact on the economy would be even worse without lockdowns. I'm not saying they are right, just pointing out you seem to be implying there's only 2 possibilities
1. we lockdown and the economy goes to bad which kills people because of lack of income
2. we don't lockdown and the economy magically stays strong.
There's other possibilities.
3. we don't lockdown, the pandemic kills millions, the economy goes down more than if we had locked down.
It's amazing how this happens when you shut down the economy because of fear of a virus with a 1% mortality rate, isn't it? Regardless of how many actual "covid deaths" (from COVID or with COVID), the destructive impacts of lockdowns far, far exceed any lives supposedly "saved" by shutting down the economy, whether you measure it in terms of economic losses, mental health, and especially educational destruction.
Nobody wants to “tank the economy”, but lots of panicky people are on HN and reddit, every day, calling for extensions of these lockdowns “because people are dying!”, even though the original pretense was quite different (“flattening the curve” doesn’t change the area under the curve). The premise of the thing is shifting, and censorship of contrary opinions is growing (as you can see from reflexive downvoting of comments here).
The people who are doing this are mostly well-off enough not to feel the direct consequences of their actions (yet), which is why they do it.
It’s the same moral hazard that leads politicians into war: gauzy moral sentiments can be very compelling when you’re paying with someone else’s lives.
Can't believe after 12 months this argument is still being made.
You say shutting down the economy so casually, as if it has no impact on an infectious disease spreading during a pandemic.
If there hadn't been any shutdown, it would lead to a tenfold increase in infections and an even higher than tenfold increase in death as hospitals will be completely overwhelmed and unable to provide normal healthcare.
But if you think a 20x death rate from the nr 1 cause of death (heart disease), preventable by a lockdown for a few more months as a vaccine is rolled out, is no big deal, then there really is no arguing with you.
The virus is tanking the economy, not the lockdown. Air travel is down 97% even though they are no laws against flying places. You can lift the lockdown if you want, but if people are too afraid to board planes and go to restaurants and bars, you are not going to magically bounce back to 4% unemployment and 2% GDP growth overnight.
> If you want to take people’s livelihoods away from them, you have to justify the seizure, not the other way around.
Conversely, you could argue that if you want to take actions that risk killing hundreds of thousands of people, then the onus is on you to prove that your actions won't cost hundreds of thousands of lives. You can't claim that enacting a lockdown requires scientific proof but lifting one does not, when the potential consequences for the latter are even higher than the former.
> Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.
The choice between "saving people" vs "economy" is a false choice. Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run. People that live in fear of the virus will not consume, and lockdowns reduce the amount of time that the virus is out there.
You can force people to go back to work, but you can't force people to consume.
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