> I'd be interested if someone knowledgable could do the math on lost years of life from 14% of the elderly dying vs such a severe economic contraction.

That's not a math problem. There is no equation for comparing the death of a human being with economic contraction.

There are some really fundamental questions here that I don't think we're going to answer soon. It's making me wonder about the nature of the US itself, with authority scattered between DC, states and counties. With a priority (arguably an obsession) with free market economics over all else.

When the dust settles the country is going to need to ask a lot of questions about how it operates. Failure to do so (and don't get me wrong, I suspect we will fail) just means the next time a pandemic like this comes around it's going to devastate the country even more.

Economic contraction would lead to decreased lifespan. There's definitely a math problem here which optimizes for saved human life. Consider that a 100% economic contraction would result in the majority of humanity dying. 10% likely means some number of deaths among the poor (I've been the poor, there's not a lot of wiggle room when you're barely scraping by deciding between heat or food in the winter).

It's not that we can't lock down and accept economic contraction, it's that we should do the math before we commit to that path. Lockdown may be the clear winner.

Economic contraction can be countered by government spending in the short term. For instance in the UK the government has pledged to pay up to 80% of unemployed workers wages during this crisis. There will certainly be a hole to dig out of later, but it means no binary choice between economic contraction and people dying.

Agreed.

This is insightful, but one missing point is that we actually can provide necessary support to allow people to remain in place for the duration. It wouldn't be without discomfort, but we don't need to cast anyone adrift.

In which case, we just need to make those details an equal part of the plan.

You just need to push the R value below 1.0 in order for it to die out of the populace.

As an extension to your point I would also like to add one aspect that is often forgotten when discussing lockdowns. Which is that a complete lockdown might potentially be worse. Because what more important than social distancing is keeping young and old apart. Families that have elderly and the young in them would just be locked in and cause the elderly to get infected and potentially die due to the virus affecting them more. Furthermore what about the medics and their families? in a lockdown they would have to return home and potentially spread it with children and elderly. So a more surgical approach is needed in which isolation happens for the vulnerable groups specifically and the young would be able to participate in the economy and we could weather both the effects of the virus and the economy but im afraid a complete lockdown might cause us to end up in a lose/lose situation. In which case i only see a vaccine as saving grace.

Buying time does get you better drugs, better testing, better data as to how much distancing is needed (there are a range of options), ability to tailor response to outbreaks in specific areas, and ultimately the vaccine. All this information is useful for future outbreaks which will potentially be worse. Alternatively if everyone gets sick at once there will be a massive percentage of people either too sick to work or out of work caring for others.