It looks to me like you are incorrectly believing that I am making an argument that attaches intrinsic value to human lives. I am not. If we assume humans are

It looks to me like you are incorrectly believing that I am making an argument that attaches intrinsic value to human lives. I am not. If we assume humans are slabs of talking meat which are worthless except for their economic properties (productivity and consumption), it is still not a likely economic win to let enormous numbers of them die because the economy is made of people. If you kill the people you kill the economy directly-- and, of course, people aren't going to continue like normal while others are dying around them regardless of what state policy is. So you are making a false comparison of the economic cost, the alternative is not "do nothing, let millions of innocent people die, and have the economy continue as if nothing happened". That isn't a possible alternative-- the economy couldn't continue as if nothing had happened if millions have died or are dying. Imagine for a moment, for the purpose of discussion, that we didn't need to keep food, medical supplies, power, etc flowing during the intervention. In that silly and unrealistic hypothetical it would be reasonable to pause the economy-- basically say "okay, for the next year all contracts are paused, all transfer of value prohibited, and in a year we just start 2020 over again for all legal and contractual purposes". Just like weekends are often disregarded in contracts but at a massive scale. No businesses would fail, nothing would change (except the people that died along the way). It's not possible to actually do this fanciful thing, because, unfortunately, we still need to keep utilities, food, medical services, etc. running and because everything is interconnected you can't just pause everything else. But if we could it would be a completely reasonable response. To the extent that, e.g. businesses fail due to this is a failure of our imagination and political will. Other than the small amount of actual damage done from spoiled goods (and deaths from the pandemic)-- all other economic consequences are a product of our beliefs and actions, and are not actual unavoidable losses in the same way that a death is. The stimulus is just one (half-assed) example of the potential ways that we can act to mitigate the direct economic harms while still protecting lives. Of course, I do also think that people's lives have tremendous intrinsic value, but that isn't part of my argument here. Instead, I was attempting to argue that even a dispassionate spherical economist murder bot should-- if it were behaving rationally-- respect that the irrecoverable loss of many human lives is something of tremendous economic significance because of the central role of as agents and targets of all economic activity. You're also disregarding the potential economic benefits of this disruption. Causing weak businesses to fail can be economically beneficial in the long run, as might the radical increase in telecommuting and video conferencing, or the development of more pandemic robust services (e.g. will we finally see automated grocery stores become a thing?) or the numerous other ways that this event might help the economy escape other local minima.