I wonder how many people will die from the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown. I wonder how many lonely older folks will wish they were dead now that they can no longer receive the few visitors they had.
I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.
Older folks? I have a mid 30's coworker who used to get most of social activity from the office and tech events and meetups (which is bad for a whole other set of reasons) but even from our fairly active work and friend group chats and you can tell he's really feeling the loneliness and depression.
He started drinking more during the week and has mentioned several times that he is very sad and can't wait for this to be all over. I know that there are thousands of people in the exact same scenario.
I come to observe suffering in people on the other end of the spectrum - the social butterflies that are like caged wild animals nowadays. Calling acquintances left and right was ok for the first two weeks or so, but as the quality of the discussed subjects dwindled and with it the frequency of social virtual interactions, there's a clear sign that the self-isolation feels more harsh for extroverted people.
You shouldn't be downvoted. The economy is not some abstract separate thing that can stopped and started at will. A prolonged economic depression will kill people just as surely as the virus. They will die deaths of despair from suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease over months and years but in the end they'll be dead all the same.
Governments can mitigate the problem to a limited extent through temporary measures like giving people money and halting evictions, but that will only help at the margins.
Older folks seem to be having the most polarized reactions, to be sure. My mother is terrified and letting her next-door neighbor do her shopping for her so her contact is limited to a single person. There's certainly no consensus among older people that they want to take their chances for the sake of the economy.
If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.
There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.
My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.
2% to 4% is the number of hospitalized people that die IF they get care.
If the health system is overrun, and there are zero ICU beds or ventilators available, that number will go up quickly. THAT is the problem we are trying to avoid.
2-4% is huge for a novel highly infectious disease. Our healthcare system is not prepared for that at all, without aggressive measures that's potential for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US.
Temporary hospitals are being set up, but we simply don't have the capacity to build life–saving machines fast enough to handle the no-social distancing scenario. Neither did China, really.
Free market knew of this possibility, but pocketed the profits for shareholders instead of making investments to prepare. And the government didn't intervene. This is a culture problem. We weren't listening.
SARS experienced countries made very different decisions, over the past few months, and since 2003.
Yup, my gut feeling is that follow on effects from rampant unemployment and financial insecurity will have a much larger effect (via stress-induced heart attacks, suicide, etc.) than the 3.4% mortality rate among reported cases (WHO numbers, not all infected, maybe not even most infected.)
I would love to see an actual statistical comparison. spookthesunset is making an excellent point. Unless we know that deaths from the virus are greater than the deaths caused by the second-and-third-order effects of panicking, you can't say for sure that the lockdown is the best thing to do right now.
>Unless we know that deaths from the virus are greater than the deaths caused by the second-and-third-order effects of panicking
Do you believe that when the death toll raises from non-panicking and not imposing a lockdown (not to mention the total saturation of the healthcare system), that wont create even more panic and self-lockdown -- and have their own second and third order effects?
Yes, and this is why - the population of investors is honestly not all that panicky. If people start dying, investors will watch the death rate, and companies' share prices will reflect some instability but it will be somewhat in line with the actual economic impact, which traders are smart enough to price it at the small level it would actually be given the mortality rate.
By imposing lockdown, we have created a real economic slowdown, that traders are smart enough to deem catastrophic (because a month or restauranteurs going without wages is actually catastrophic and represents a much larger loss of future incomes that the still-small-but-blown-up-in-the-media death rate from the unchecked coronavirus.) Unlike the non-lockdown option, there is no optimistic case. You can't say, "earnings are slow, but people will be sorry if they panic sell because when the media frenzy dies down things will settle." You have to say, "earnings are slow, and might not actually pick up again because the lockdown lost a bunch of people their job."
I've been on a team with a super productive whiteboard user, who made ideas more clear by the ability to draw diagrams. I have also been on a team with a unproductive coworker whose whiteboard drawings were confusing, took lots of time to draw, and were generally unhelpful.
Both people thought their whiteboarding was indispensible. Neither person's actually were, even the guy who was quite effective at drawing his ideas.
The interesting thing to me is that they had an open-source support business getting requests to buy their services, which the salesmen dropped because it wasn't the most lucrative deal they could be doing. But presumably there's a viable business in that particular type of support.
In my experience, those kinds of support contracts are mostly valuable (and mostly intended to be valuable) as a way to shove your foot in the door at large companies. Often they're not valued at all, and exist just as a legacy from when the company was younger and any sale was a good sale. It's not surprising to me that an incoming lead whose first question is "what are your prices" would be considered a waste of time.
I feel the same. I do full-time ClojureScript - at least a few jobs exist! If you would like a job doing ClojureScript, email me at the address in my bio.
I'd be willing to bet it's more than the actual numbers affected by a virus and an overburdened hospital system.