> we seem to be favoring the economy over human life

I really don't agree with this meme at all and the evidence doesn't support it whatsoever. The people that are hurt most by the shutdown are lower class service workers, not Wall Street stockbrokers. As I just mentioned, everyday people are hurting far more from the lockdown than from the virus. If you really cared about the average person, you'd want to get society running as soon as safely possible.

The idea that the government can support or pay for the salary of the entire/most of the population for a sustained period of time is also completely ludicrous and impossible.

The problem is that as the lock downs work, it's easy to lose sight of what could have been, they stop it getting out of control and it still looks bad as there was the initial clump of infections, but the abstract hundreds per day that are dying are still fairly remote for most of us as only 1%-2% of many of our populations got infected. One can still throw around figures of "it's less death than this" or "the lock down is causing X amount of economic + societal misery".

The scientific consensus seems to be that if the disease had just been left to run it's course, even with people being moderately careful given how infectious it is, it would have caused huge death figures. Perhaps that might be proved wrong when we see some countries that simply socially distanced instead of locking down, but was it ever worth the risk?

All these "well, it's bad, but look at the economic damage" have to be weighed against what could have been, not what is. And we just can't imagine this, we can say it, but how many of us can imagine 10,000s dead per day?

Your Aunt dead, a colleague dead and your best-friend's Dad dead, your Butcher's Grandmother dead, your barista's sister dead, a teacher at your primary school dead, your football team's goalie dead. And more, and more. Of the few hundred people you know you would have known several people who would have died, or the thousand or so you are a 2nd connection to you would have heard of many deaths.

On top of that all, New York and the UK only really have Italy and Spain to look at as any sort of predictor. They now have to watch just two countries to see what happens when they start easing the restrictions, and due to the massive lag between infection and hospitalisation/death and insufficient testing capacity, it's all still guess work.

Lift it a week or two too early, and you might have to go into another lock down in a few months time.

This isn't what the death statistics are showing, whatsoever. Unless your barista's sister, football team's goalie, etc. are all over 70 years old, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be dead. Your scenario is fear-mongering, plain and simple.

The Barista's sister would fall into the thousands (or even 10,000s) of 2nd connections you have, in which there will almost certainly be young deaths. The goalie might have had health complications. I personally know at least 2 people with diabetes, 2 with asthma, plus one post-cancer. Maybe I'm a little older than you, but many of us would know a young-ish person that would die (a quarter maybe if the 0.2% chance of 20-39 year old death is in the right order of magnitude).

Also, don't forget death rates would go up if a healthcare system collapses, which we haven't seen.

I think you're the delusional one, while your personal chance of dying is fairly low, you know hundreds of people, and those people know thousands more.

Are the chances of these people dying from COVID greater than other risks we take every single day, yet don't shut down society and curtail freedoms over?

That is really the only question that matters.

Yes, for example covid deaths in Scotland are 1/3 of all deaths, deaths in UK:

"The Office for National Statistics said that in the week to 3 April, 16,387 people died in England and Wales, an increase of 5,246 deaths compared with the previous week and 6,082 more than the five-year average."

And that's WITH a lock down, way before the massive peak that could have happened.

It's like you're stuck in the wishful thinking stage the rest of us were in two months ago.

The deaths in NY,LA,CA, and MI include many,many people under 70.

Also, you’ve responded several times without answering my question:

How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?

Yes, many people under 70 have died. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, all of which are tragedies. People also die from a variety of other diseases, accidents, and other things on a regular basis in numbers that dwarf the coronavirus. Yet, we don't shut down society over it.

> How many of your family, friends, and acquaintances are you willing to put up for the experiment?

This kind of snarky comment is precisely the problem. I'm not "willing to put up my friends" for experiment, because this isn't some zero sum game with simple answers. As I have said a dozen times now: it is a complicated situation and this "but people are dying, so we have to be as draconian as possible" take is extremely shortsighted.

There are millions of people that will now have serious problems because of the total shutdown. Here's a number for you:

> 45,000 – or one in five – suicides a year worldwide to unemployment, with a further 5,000 deaths caused by the economic crisis.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/the-link-between-unem...

45,000 people a year kill themselves because of unemployment. And that's just after 2008. We are apparently headed for a far worse crisis.

Have you considered the possibility that completely shutting down everything for months on end will result in more chaos and death than the virus itself? Even worse, this is entirely unpredictable?