That’s a misconception though. Economic depression and deprivation also causes death, and staggering amounts of human misery.

Evil is reserved as a description for gross failures of moral duty. Choosing pragmatically between several terrible options with highly unpredictable outcomes does not meet that standard.

> Economic depression and deprivation also causes death, and staggering amounts of human misery.

Let's quantify things here, for a first world country with a social net.

On the one hand, we have people getting evicted from their homes and having to visit soup kitchens.

On the other hand, we have dead people (more likely, dead poor people).

Evil seems pretty fair.

> On the one hand, we have people getting evicted from their homes and having to visit soup kitchens.

Which translates directly into many years of reduced life expectancy, no?

I have trouble seeing a worse economy for a few months vs a highly optimistic 100,000+ dead having similar numbers of lost lives.

It's not just a few months though; a 0.2% recession (say) quite possibly translates to everyone in the future being 0.2% worse off, forever.

That would be true if annual returns were independent of each other which is definitely not the case.

I understand the point you and GP are trying to make.

I'm saying that the two miseries feel like apples vs oranges, given the context.

You'd have to go pretty far to convince me that (even mass) economic depression is more harmful than widespread, near-term fatalities.

That is part of the problem. It is very hard to quantify the consequences of economic depression because it affects everyone at least a little bit, and some more than others. It might cause so and so many more people to have to go through therapy, so and so many families break up over financial hardships, and the children are ever so slightly worse off and the second-order consequences aren't fully realised until 30 years down the line. It's individually (possibly) very small effects, but it hits the entire population.

That's hard to weigh against a concrete number of very concrete deaths and serious recuperation periods.

mass economic depression affects certain groups more than others.

Near-term fatalities affect certain groups more than others. Those with access to medical services (or can pay for more of it) will be less affected.

Which side being worse is a determination you have to make for yourself.

Funnily enough recessions are associated with lower overall mortality rates.

Something to remember the next time people harp on about GDP being the most important metric for a country's advancement.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-02-recession-greater-dec...

There was an op ed recently from a former member of the Johnson government that stated "It is time the economists took over from the doctors, before the real pandemic [economic recession] spreads."

So that, told me all I need to know about the cruelty and stupidity of the UK government at this time.

Just to correct this, the statement was made by Omar Hassan, who was head of inward Middle Eastern investment while Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, and was never part of the Johnson government. Here's the article the quote comes from:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-deaths-trum...

Thanks, I didn't realize that.

It is basically nothing like that in any way. If it works, it will not be at the expense of extra "sacrificed" lives, that's nonsense. The basic idea is to isolate the vulnerable and eventually protect them with herd immunity. You are allowed to opine that this will fail dismally, but you're not allowed to just make shit up and accuse people of sacrificing lives. Have an ounce of shame.

How are going to isolate the vulnerable population? They also neglect that the vulnerable population clusters. Old people socialize with other old people. A bunch of immune school kids don’t provide much herd immunity to a nursing home.

They might if they were the kids of people working at the nursing home. I am not sure if this strategy will work either but I get it -- every infected and recovered individual is another control rod pushed into the out-of-control atomic pile.

The problem is that most of the people in the nursing home are the residents. If none of them get the disease, The R0 in the nursing home is still going to be well above one. The minute one person who is infected shows up at the nursing home, it races through the whole place.

Meanwhile, in the schools, the intention is to get the rate of kids that are immune as close to 100% as possible. That will be difficult without deliberately inoculating them, because they will develop herd immunity at about 66% in their population and it won't spread in that population anymore.

In the nuclear reactor analogy, it's as if you put in half the control rods, but only the ones on the left side of the reactor. That might make the left side strongly subcritical, but the right side might still be critical, even if with an even distribution of the same number of rods, the whole reactor would be subcritical.

This plan is not going to work and it will kill millions of people in Britain unless Chloroquine or something else ends up being a silver bullet for treatment.

> The basic idea is to isolate the vulnerable and eventually protect them with herd immunity.

so what about those who had to suffer to give this herd immunity? If i were a UK citizen, and i got infected, there's a non-zero chance that i will also need a ventilator. Any, even a tiny misstep will cause the numbers to grow beyond the amount of beds available. That i am asked to take this risk is absurd.

Full isolation and quarantine is a more conservative way - for myself at least. Even if the economic damage is severe.