Lives and dollars are not totally different things. How many lives will be ruined by total financial destruction? How many will commit suicide in the months and years after due to financial issues?

If there is total financial destruction at the level of people losing their homes, not being able to eat, having their utilities cut off etc. it will be entirely due to policy choices that prioritise maintaining the current economic system and protecting the interests of the wealthy for the duration of the crisis over ensuring that everyone can survive with a basic, indeed decent, standard of life. By this I mean having their basic needs of nutrition, shelter, heat etc. met. For many (and I'm writing from the UK) this would actually be an improvement over the current situation. Globally we are the richest society in history by a profoundly long way, we have enough resources to get through this crisis. There is no reason that anyone should lose their home, or starve, or be left without power. But we have to acknowledge that, just as in situations such as WWII, normal economic life and the interests of capital / shareholders / the wealthy have to take a back seat to ensuring that, as far as possible, everyone can maintain a decent standard of life.

Lives and money are not the same thing. Hard stop. I understand your point, but I just disagree with the expected outcomes here.

Realistically how much would it cost to bail out these businesses and provide a safety net to people? I imagine the numbers are less than we'd first think.

It's a choice. It's not inevitable.

People work their whole lives to make the value we measure in dollars. We humans have been dying for millenia for lack of the material wealth we have now. Having materials/dollars/whatever you want to call it is clearly worth lives because people spend vast portions of their precious lives getting it. If anything, valuing 1 more year of working life at 80 over ten years over 10years of working in your 20s would be silly.

I'm not saying that people don't need material wealth to survive in our society. I think that wealth can come from somewhere other than packing a petri dish bar with patrons who want to drink. For example, we're realistically looking at govt intervention at some point.

It starts with a concerted decision that lives are more important than money. If we can't get onboard with that, then there will always be people that put their well-being over others.

Death rate is highly correlated with unemployment. They are not NOT the same thing.

https://news.yale.edu/2002/05/23/rising-unemployment-causes-...

This is either a straw man argument, or I disagree that there should be long term unemployment here. Govt programs and laws will probably be needed to provide that safety net.

I'm not saying that death rate and unemployment are unrelated (equating lives and money together). I am saying that we should prioritize lives first, and figure out the money once we stop the damage.

>> I am saying that we should prioritize lives first, and figure out the money once we stop the damage.

False dichotomy. There are plenty of economists and accountants and others who can work on the economic relief package and do so in a meaningful way while scientists and medical teams (plus politicians) handle the lifesaving operations. There is no reason they cannot run in parallel.

Uhhhhh ok. I'm not really sure why you think I said they can't run in parallel? What I am saying is that you can't prioritize money over lives and actively do things to harm the life of others.

This whole comment is about the approach to covid-19 where life goes on as normal and you don't practice social distancing at all. One argument for people that do that is that they can't take off work because their businesses are open and will fire them. I believe the businesses should be forced into social distancing and provided financial help if unable to do that. We're actively going to see this happen in the next week—it started tonight—will it be late?

Why do you expect long term unemployment here? Unless the virus crisis lasts for a year, in a few months things will be back to normal hopefully and you can expect the economic activity to take off again.

...

If small businesses are not economically relieved, there will be significant - and permanent - damage to those sectors.

Who will provide the safety net when the entire economy is shut down? Production precedes consumption, always.

This is a straw man argument. Nobody proposes shutting down essential parts of the economy, such as food production or basic infrastructure. I think we are going to survive just fine without new iPhones or SV startups for a few weeks.

Those are the questions we need to figure out as a country or even as a world. Realistically, the govt needs to provide that safety net for its citizens.

However, let's start with the decision that lives are more important than money.

There is economic activity still going on. A complete economic collapse is different than what I'd expect to see.

A relevant question is "how much would this cost?", to which I have no clue. If we're talking billions of dollars, that's essentially a write-off amount at the federal level.

Governments at all levels, companies and non-profits can (and I don't doubt will) help mitigate the financial hit in the months and years ahead. The California state government has for example promised to keep paying teachers and school staff. [1] Many tech companies for example are continuing to pay maintenance staff despite office closures. [2] NBA players have donated to arena staff affected by cancellations. [3]

But there is nothing anyone can do to bring back our loved ones.

[1] https://edsource.org/2020/newsom-assures-districts-theyll-be...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/coronavirus-google-facebook-...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/us/nba-player-donations-coron...

> How many will commit suicide in the months and years after due to financial issues?

Hopefully 0 if we provide a robust social safety net for people who's livelihoods are harmed.

I predict a 1% chance of that happening in the US. The 1% is due to the possibility that so many people are affected that they overthrow the government.

Even if we accept your premise, how many dollars in economic activity will be destroyed by the deaths of enormous numbers of working age people because the hospitals were overloaded and they couldn't get the critical care they needed?

I know this is horrible, but likely not too many. In Italy they are currently kicking people over 60 out of the hospitals to make way for the younger people who are more likely to survive with medical treatment.

If a lot of people die, a lot of economic value will be literally put into the ground: funerals, handling of estates, coffins. That's not long-term productive value. At best it reshuffles money in an optimal-blind way.

And they have roughly 5 times the beds per 1000 people too.

No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

> No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

Do you have a link to statistics that support that? Is that on an absolute basis or on a per-capita basis?

On a per-capita basis, I see more hospital beds in Italy than in the US (3.18 to 2.77): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp...

What's your source for data on critical care beds? I'd love to take a look

Oh sorry. Meant to post the article, from Forbes. US and germany are way ahead of the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...

Hospital beds are a different story, but not what is important for COVID, which needs ICU beds. Hospital beds are much easier to deploy anywhere (and with the emergency measures taken federally, will see a huge increase due to waived FDA requirements for inspection). An ICU is much more involved, and requires ventilators, specialty beds, special equipment, etc. Much more difficult to deploy suddenly in response to sudden upticks.

Except "working age people" are pretty much not impacted by this. The massive death rates are for people with existing preconditions: heart disease, lung problems, etc. There have been no deaths with children.

Practically speaking, the only thing a "working page person" (<60) could do is unknowingly spread the virus to someone else.

Sorry, I wish that were true. A non-trivial number of people under 60 year old also end up seriously ill and require critical care. In Wuhan half of all patients admitted to the ICU were age 25-49 ( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... ).

For these younger people their prospects are good if they receive that care. An overloaded health system may be unable to provide that care to everyone who won't survive without it, including some younger people.

A tremendous number of working people also have preconditions which are implicated for covid19 including hypertension and obesity.

If you are a younger person and carelessly get an avoidable infection and end up in an overloaded hospital needing intensive care, your life may well be saved due to being triaged ahead of an older person with worse prospects. But in that case your life would be saved at the expense of someone else's. ... someone else who's infection might also be due to your spreading. I wouldn't be okay with that, and I hope you're not either. So I hope your glib attitude doesn't mean that you're not taking avoidable risks.

In the US there hasn't yet been clearly established ethical guidance to direct triaging like that. Your local hospital may assign ICU care first come first served... if so mortality rates there for younger people won't look so good.

And now the CDC is reporting similarly to my claims above: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm?s_cid=mm...

We will not value the lives of people with money over those that do not. Financial loss is _not_ the loss of life. Our lives are literally the only thing we have in this universe.

That's no what my comment said. The people who will be hit the hardest are those with little money and little employment protections. People working casual in these restaurants will be left with no job and no support.

Has anyone thought about what will happen once other countries start getting better? They might as well quarantine the UK as a redzone area.