New York Governor announces 100% workforce reduction for non-essential services

Re:New York Governor announces 100% workforce reduction for ... by StanislavPetrov on Friday March 20, 2020 @09:33PM (#22643480)

Except it doesn't work that way, because a certain % of people who get sick require hospitalization to survive - including people under 50 - even if that's a lower % than those who are older and/or have underlying medical conditions. We have under a million total hospital beds in the USA. If 100 million under 50s get sick right away and just 3% of them require hospitalization that's still 3x as many hospital beds as we have in the entire country (and that doesn't factor in all the people who require hospital beds for non-coronavirus reasons).

How many hundreds of thousands or millions of preventable deaths are acceptable to you for a faster bounceback of the economy?

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Re:New York Governor announces 100% workforce reduction for ... by fennecfoxen on Friday March 20, 2020 @10:33PM (#22643768)

> How many hundreds of thousands or millions of preventable deaths are acceptable to you for a faster bounceback of the economy?

This is a really good question, because a dead economy is deadly too, and a shutdown is particularly hard on the people who can afford it least.

Normal Quality-Adjusted-Year-of-Life estimates are $50,000-$150,000. If this is a good estimate then ideally our economic shutdown won't pay much more than that overall; if we pay much more as a society, we have probably gone too far.

(And of course it feels bad to put a dollar value on a human life, so not everyone will want to do that. This doesn't change that we have to make this decision, though, it just means that we make our decision blindly and harm people more than we ought.)

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