But yeah that's another factor against this.
That's quite an assumption!
Alternatively, as a base case we are going to have years of a recession. Evictions, foreclosures, wiped out retirements, divorces, ruined childhoods and early careers messing up millions of lives for decades, suicides, preventable deaths in the developing world where losing your livelihood is a much bigger deal, potential flare-up of wars as young men there don't have jobs, etc.
I honestly tried to think about it and the only tangential thing I could definitely predict is LOTS of people from the city councils all the way to the white house not being re-elected. Which, obviously, made me even more cynical.
He brings up the Statistical Value of a Human Life (SVHL) which is a valid point yet uncomfortable to people who are new to learning how our world functions.
Also some of us are old enough to still remember the swine flu (H1N1) and the bird flu (H5N1).
So, is saving lives worth the economic impact? I think the answer is very simple.
Would you rather lose your job or your parents?
Then, as I also said, if you are 60 and your very old mother is on her death bed, and you get to buy her one more week of life by eliminating your entire retirements savings, would you do it? If not, after that we are so to speak just haggling about the price. Oh, and what if I came for your retirement savings because they could save my mother, that you don't even know?
There are trade-off on another level too. Recessions have very real human consequences that I mentioned in another comment. Many of them involve deaths, but many more just involve ruined lives. I'd sooner let one 80yo die than make one 40yo miserable for the rest of his life.
No. Only the UK is operating on that fatalist assumption. South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully contained it, and Italy is starting to do so as well.
> Matt Hancock insists 'herd immunity' not part of government's plan for tackling coronavirus
> Mr Hancock added: "Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy. Our goal is to protect life from this virus, our strategy is to protect the most vulnerable and protect the NHS through contain, delay, research and mitigate."
https://politicshome.com/news/uk/health-and-care/illnesstrea...
That is a lack of testing, same as what keeps US numbers depressed. India is severely lacking in cohesive response to viral outbreaks, to the point they are still dealing with a Swine Flu epidemic from 2009 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/9-swine-flu-deaths-utt...)
> There is a theory that humid and warm places will not have these mortality rate
There is no scientific evidence to support this. The wild spread in the Middle East indicates heat may not be a factor.
Now, if you put value on days of human life (which you totally can do; first, as a matter of policy, you won't pay a million dollars to give a 90 year old another year of life, nor would you pay a billion to cure cancer in one teenager; second, you do it every day when you take quantifiable risks to make money or for convenience, everything from being a logger or a deep sea fisherman, to merely driving)... if you put value on human life, how much would this waste of life be worth? And how much waste of life is a worldwide recession or depression going to produce - in direct deaths, days lost by billions of people in s terrible economy, esp. if it gets to GD levels or worse, or in the developing world where it definitely will if the economy grinds to a halt; and on top of that in purely monetary terms, as people are not able to do things from buying houses to merely making ends meet, depending on the circumstances?
At this point everybody seems to admit it's beyond containment and the only thing we are trying to do is flatten the curve and prevent the deaths. Is entering a recession, or worse a depression and risking a total collapse really worth it? I am starting to doubt it.
PS. Frankly this reminds me of plane crash reporting. Everybody is, comparatively speaking, overreacting because the event is visible and distinct, even though many more people die in cars every day.