Quote (Kayeto @ 28 Mar 2020 07:14)
Trump has people in his ear telling him that the economic fallout is going to cost more lives than the direct loss of life to the first wave of the virus. Fauci's counterargument is that losing 2% of the population will have an even bigger economic cost than months of shut down. But since 90% of that 2% is going to be age 70+, Fauci's argument gets shouted down. The following statement could be true, though I'm not sure that anyone on the planet knows enough about the future to say for sure: Getting the US population back to 330million will happen faster by letting 2% die fast (then rebound later) than by letting 1% die slowly, worsening the depression and therefore having a weaker economy (lower birth rates, lower average life span) over the next decade.
Now, this puts Trump in an impossible position. He does not have option of making the hard choice, like the Brazilian president is doing, and just letting the pandemic run its course. You just cannot support that narrative in a public forum. The public literally cannot ever accept any solution which appears to be a direct sacrifice of lives, despite the fact that those lives are going to be lost anyway, possibly even more, over a longer period in other indirect ways. Those kinds of decisions are typically reserved for generals who are sacrificing the lives of soldiers who understood what they were signing up for. When we see the Brazilian president shrugging off the problem, every molecule of common sense in our brain goes haywire. We cannot comprehend how that could be the right thing to do, because the fallout from a decade-long depression is beyond our imagination.
It's easy for us to imagine a person in a hospital bed dying. We've seen it on TV and we may have even seen it real life. In our brains, we can multiply that by 3 million, be terrified by the idea and conclude that it must be stopped at all costs. But our brains cannot imagine a decade long depression in which suicides are so common that seeing someone jump from a tall building and land in the street doesn't even make you blink an eye. That's an "it could never happen here" kind of idea. It's so far outside our frame of reference that we aren't in a position to truly compare those 2 outcomes.
The point is: there is no guarantee that there would really be a decades-long depression, and there is no guarantee that the first round of social distancing will be futile. There's also no precedent on the amount of damage that sacrificing the elderly for the sake of the economy would potentially inflict on the fabric of society and the national psyche.
Imho, the most sensible course of action right now is close to what most countries are doing anyway: freeze the economy and public life, push down infection rates via social distancing. Do this not for many months, but for 4-6 weeks. During this timeframe, expand testing capacities as much as humanly possible, push ahead potential medicine for treating covid-19 as quick as medically feasible, come up with an antibody test that shows which persons already went through the virus and can be assumed immune for the time being. Strengthen hospitals and clinics as much as possible. Produce masks and ventilators with utmost priority.
4-6 weeks after starting the shutdown, slowly open up society while keeping the vulnerable and elderly at home as much as possible. Employ constant and extensive testing to trace new clusters of infections, quarantine everybody testing positive for 2 weeks. Those who have already overcome the virus and built up antibodies and immunity can embrace public life fully, the healthy non-immune persons keep being tested.
If this approach fails, then and only then do the questions you have raised become relevant again. I've been saying for days that we cannot possibly sustain the current shutdown, let alone an actual, proper curfew, for much longer than 4-6 weeks. If this approach fails, then we might indeed have to go for the "blood sacrifice" in order to prevent even greater havoc. But it's definitely worth a try - and even if we in the end cannot stop this virus from spreading uncontrollably, those 4-6 weeks will still have bought our healthcare system valuable time.
The difference in the body count between "full yolo starting in mid March" and "full yolo starting in early May because the economy is on death's door and we cant possibly wait any longer" might well be in the hundreds of thousands. As in: if doing nothing since the beginning might end with 2.2m deaths according to the Imperial College study, then giving up on mitigation starting in May (after the shutdown has hypothetically failed) might lead to 1.0-1.5m deaths.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 28 2020 12:52am