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Shutting down the country destroys everything. I'm not sure it's worth it.
by 6nf 7y ago
Shutting down the country destroys everything. I'm not sure it's worth it.
- madeofpalk 7y agoEveryone dying destroys everything. I'm not sure saving a cafe is worth thousands or millions of deaths.
- nostromo 7y agoPeople work at that cafe and use their income to feed and house their families, and to provide them with healthcare. Don’t be dismissive of these concerns, they are very real.
- applecrazy 7y agoWhich is exactly why social safety net programs exist and continue to function during these times. Not to mention the checks that will be mailed out to every taxpayer soon. We can and should essentially shut down the country
- 6nf 7y agoWe don't have a safety net that can feed the whole country. Some people still have to work to actually grow the food, do the distribution, and feed everyone. How is that going to happen if everyone sits at home for 2 months?
- madeofpalk 7y agoI partially own, while my parents run, a cafe that's pretty fucked. I'm incredibly aware of these concerns. I just think that health comes before economy. Without healthy people, you don't have an economy.
- 6nf 7y agoWhat about 97% healthy people. Is that sufficient for an economy?
- smallgovt 7y ago> I just think that health comes before economy. I don't think we can make such a blanket assertion. The US markets have lost 10T in value over the past month. If the virus infects 70% of the US population with a 2% mortality rate, 4.2M ppl will die. It's obviously not so simple, but we're sacrificing $2.4M in market cap per life saved. At some point, the tradeoff makes no sense in light of the fact that we could invest in life saving technologies/solutions that save more lives down the road.
- madeofpalk 7y agoAre you saying 4.2 million people should die?
- smallgovt 7y agoYes, I'm saying at some point we should make the choice between a lot of people dying now and even more people dying later.
- aianus 7y ago~57 million people die every regular year for whatever reasons Even doubling that does not "destroy everything"
- madeofpalk 7y agoI think that an extra 57 million people dying is devastating, and we should do everything in our power - even if it means shutting down restaurants - to prevent 57 million needless deaths.
- 6nf 7y agoProblem is the current plan will not save 57 million people. Not even close. The mortality rate will still be 3.6% and we still expect 70% of the population to get infected. So if it was as simple as you say, then sure. Let's shut it all down. But shutting it all down is not going to save us from Covid19.
- edmundsauto 7y agoSimilarly, shutting down non-essential jobs for a couple of months does not destroy everything.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jungturk 7y agoBut the death rates suggest everyone won't be dying, so we needn't ascribe too much concern to this outcome.
- owaislone 7y agoBut infection rate being so high when left unchecked means the small % of deaths could be hundreds of thousands or even millions all over the world. Also Italy almost had a death rate of 8% yesterday which is huge. Plus when hospitals get overloaded, patients needing critical care for problems other than covid-19 will die as well. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-researchers-model-likely-impact/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese...
- banachtarski 7y ago> I'm not sure it's worth it. It is. The quarantines/border-restrictions are not permanent measures, and acting swiftly is the correct way to nip it in the bud. > Shutting down the country destroys everything. Empty hyperbole. Death tolls in the tens of millions is a far worse outcome, as is stressing our current healthcare systems well beyond their capacities.
- H8crilA 7y agoMind boggling that someone could think that a month or two months shutdown "destroys the economy", but all Americans infected and several % dead doesn't "destroy the economy".
- nostromo 7y agoWe’ve had one week of shut down in Seattle and there’s already been a huge wave of layoffs. Two months? It’s difficult to think what will happen. Economies don’t have a pause button. Companies, banks, and families quickly become insolvent.
- H8crilA 7y agoI agree, this clearly needs a govt bailout. Fed already rains liquidity into the treasuries like a madman, just wait till it buys corporates and God knows what else. Treasury should now simply guarantee salaries. The unconditional helicopter money is a good idea too. This will bridge the discrepancy between financial time (which has not stopped) and economic time (which is stopping, slowly, but has to come to a full stop). But at any rate, lives > economy. Only one of those is a renewable resource.
- 6nf 7y ago> lives > economy. Only one of those is a renewable resource. Not sure I follow. Are you saying the economy is not a renewable resource? Cause I'm creating a new life as we speak.
- 7y ago
- 1996 7y agoSome people are already calling the virus the "boomer remover" I'm not sure I want to be in their camp. Even with all the generational resentment in the world, destroying the economy may be better than destroying lives.
- lonelappde 7y agoI've been wondering, all the kids pushing the nonsense stereotype prejudice against "boomers" -- do they all hate their grandparents?
- nostromo 7y agoBoomers are too young in general. But “Silent Generation Remover” is equally distasteful and doesn’t rhyme.
- forkexec 7y agoThat's some serious ageist hate coming from people who may get to be old themselves someday, with younger generations cheering for their death. The Golden Rule didn't get learned, I guess.
- H8crilA 7y agoThe economy will not be destroyed. It will merely change. It will be actually "destroyed" if the virus is not stopped. For God's sake people stop thinking about your S&P500 index funds for a second. Also, if you still want to be selfish, your index funds will go down to ~zero if the virus is not stopped.
- nostromo 7y agoLooking at this in dispassionate economic terms... It’s not clear to me that letting the virus run it’s coarse would hurt the economy. Some (but certainly not most) very old people would die, but they are not in their productive years. Their assets would pass to younger people who would be more inclined to put them to use in the economy.
- 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zamalek 7y agoMillions dying is pretty damaging, too. We can plan and mitigate with one strategy, nature dictates the outcome of the other.
- pikma 7y agoSeeing the replies, it seems that most people agree that it is worth it. But in the last few weeks I keep wondering if our reaction to covid-19 is consistent with our reactions to other causes of mortality. For example: - 1.25 million people die in road crashes every year, yet we have collectively decided that abandoning cars is too large a sacrifice to make. - global warming has the potential to cause huge devastations and millions of death, yet we fail to make the adequate sacrifices to limit our emissions. So, is there something different about covid-19 that warrants these differences? Is the fatality rate higher, for example? Or could it be a difference of game theory? For example for global warming, everybody has to participate in order to see gains. Or maybe humans have a natural fear of germs and react stronger to contagious diseases than to other risks? I remember reading that argument in Factfulness.
- H8crilA 7y agoYou got your numbers wrong. In 2016 in the US 37k people died in car crashes. At 2% fatality rate and 70% infection rate the virus will kill 4.6M Americans. That's over a 100x difference.
- pikma 7y agoThe 1.25 million is worldwide.
- H8crilA 7y ago7.7 billion people * 0.7 * 0.02 = 108 million people Now show me a cause of death that involves 108 million people that's not taken seriously.
- spectramax 7y agoAlso, in a matter of short period ~4 months. This is a serious pandemic.
- kortex 7y agoGlobal warming is too abstract, hard to reason by some due to the distance of cause and effect. Car driving fatality is fairly bounded. 124 ppm/year in USA. Coronavirus 19 has the possibility to mutate and keep waving over the world, killing an unbounded number of people, which is downright terrifying. The best-case estimate of fatality is 5000 ppm and >50% of Americans getting it, that's 20x more deadly than cars.
- dboreham 7y agoProbably is especially as effective drug therapies may be available in the short term.
- lowbloodsugar 7y agoThe US GDP is $19 trillion. If we just stopped everything, we would be missing $1.6t per month. Conceivably, the government could pump that much money into the economy by just writing checks to everyone so that they could pay their rent, their mortgage, and their landlord could pay their mortgage. We'd need to write checks to businesses too. And this is worst case. The economy hasn't shut down. Many of us are still employed and getting paid and I certainly am very grateful for that. But I'm not going to the pub every weekend so those people need cash. If we can treat this as hitting the pause button on the economy, and find a way to fund it during this period, then we can press the play button and carry on where we left off. Of course that would require Russia, OPEC and the US to stop pumping oil. And a billion other details. But there's a lot of us, and we don't have much else to do. This could be an economic disaster, but it doesn't need to be. Sure, another alternative is we kill all the old people and all the doctors and nurses. Apparently some people aren't worried about the old people, but surely their self interest benefits from not killing all the doctors and nurses?