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Not only will the shutdown only delay deaths, the shutdown itself will cause deaths. With 3 million people ALREADY losing their jobs after less than a few weeks

Not only will the shutdown only delay deaths, the shutdown itself will cause deaths. With 3 million people ALREADY losing their jobs after less than a few weeks of shutdowns, we could see 10 to 20 million losing their jobs if this lasts several more months. Suicides alone from the shutdown would exceed the loss expected from the virus. Then as into that the number of people kicked of healthcare from losing their jobs or that just don't have enough money to afford that expensive health treatment. Now beyond jobs effect look at what will happen to the crime rate and murder rate when poverty strikes, and as others have said if you no longer afford car or home insurance, now people on the brink lose more than everything from fires or accidents. Im not about to calculate the exact number of ancillary deaths from a shutdown, and maybe it is very difficult to quantify which is why no one is doing it but as the president said the cure can't be worse than the disease.

btilly 7y ago
Suicides alone from the shutdown would exceed the loss expected from the virus. It is unlikely but possible that suicides from the shutdown will exceed deaths from the disease. But it is absolutely not true that they will exceed projected deaths from letting the disease run its course unchecked. Here is a parallel. We are afraid of buildings catching fire, so we build sprinkler systems into them. But the result is that in actual fires, the water damage from the sprinkler system exceeds the damage from the fire. That's because there is a fairly small fire and a big wet area from the sprinklers. Is this an argument for not having the sprinkler system? Of course not! Because the damage from the sprinkler system is far less than what the damage from an unchecked fire would have been.
- berryjerry 7y ago
  Suicides may very well exceed the loss. The current virus estimates are for 240,000 deaths/year. Suicides from 20 million layoffs could easily exceed that. The comparison to sprinklers is a false equivalency. It would be more like, if one house catches fire, should you turn on the sprinkler system for the entire city?
  - btilly 7y ago
    Do you have a source for that estimate and the assumptions it is based on. By my estimate, the deaths in the USA alone, with no lockdowns, is around 2 million this year. Other attempts that I’ve seen to estimate it come out with similar figures.

btilly 7y ago

Suicides alone from the shutdown would exceed the loss expected from the virus. It is unlikely but possible that suicides from the shutdown will exceed deaths from the disease. But it is absolutely not true that they will exceed projected deaths from letting the disease run its course unchecked. Here is a parallel. We are afraid of buildings catching fire, so we build sprinkler systems into them. But the result is that in actual fires, the water damage from the sprinkler system exceeds the damage from the fire. That's because there is a fairly small fire and a big wet area from the sprinklers. Is this an argument for not having the sprinkler system? Of course not! Because the damage from the sprinkler system is far less than what the damage from an unchecked fire would have been.

berryjerry 7y ago
Suicides may very well exceed the loss. The current virus estimates are for 240,000 deaths/year. Suicides from 20 million layoffs could easily exceed that. The comparison to sprinklers is a false equivalency. It would be more like, if one house catches fire, should you turn on the sprinkler system for the entire city?
- btilly 7y ago
  Do you have a source for that estimate and the assumptions it is based on. By my estimate, the deaths in the USA alone, with no lockdowns, is around 2 million this year. Other attempts that I’ve seen to estimate it come out with similar figures.