It doesn't mesh because you're omitting, "...could have led to substantially less economic loss".
It won't be years before good conclusions can be drawn. Some states are already reporting that cases have already gone past their peak. Most countries that had outbreaks in March are seeing rates of cases going down. We'll probably be able to have a good idea of the scope of this pandemic by the end of summer.
The economic harm is not hallucinatory. What is hallucinatory about 3 million people out of work in the span of a few weeks? You write that these people can go back to work when the crisis is over, but that is not true. If your employer goes out of business, or has too few customers to sustain as many employees, people are going to have to find new jobs. You also write about the loss of productivity in terms of the people who died due to the virus. That is something to account for, but the bulk of the virus' victims are not of working age.
Whether or not you're comfortable with valuing human live does not alter the fact that we put value on life all the time. Whether it's deciding insurance payouts, worker's compensation, or healthcare spending we're constantly expressing the value of lives in dollar terms. Current predictions put the economic impact per life saved by social distancing at ~$190 million. Even if we assume that social distancing is only responsible for half the economic downturn, we're still talking about nearly $100M per death averted. Saying that this is excessive, and concluding that restrictions were excessive is entirely fair. How much money would a state funded healthcare system spend on its worst case patients? A lot less than $100 million.
That sounds, on the face of it, implausibly high. To run some numbers - estimates of how much of the population would be infected without countermeasures run 40-70%, and death rates run 1-2% (this would be much worse if hospitals were overrun by an estimated 8 million ICU patients over a few months, but we'll use very conservative numbers). The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months?
Italy and Denmark have initiated random testing have revised death rates to be far lower, less than once percent. Random testings substantially increases the denominator, since it captures the vast majority of people who did not have serious symptoms. The infected cruise ship had a death rate of 0.7%, which is even more surprising giving the older average age of cruise passengers. The fact that places are reporting higher death rates than a population disproportionately older should have raised eyebrows. Again, the data itself is not suspect it's failing to account for the selection bias it imposes. But this does result in some very skewed conclusions on your end:
> The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months?
1.3 million deaths is an order of magnitude more than what is being projected. Earlier this month, the range given was 100,000 - 240,000. Now this projection has been lowered first to 80,000 and now to 60,000:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-coronavirus-wednesd...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/0...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fauci-say...
You don't think anyone else has noticed this? The estimates have been based on lower numbers than the raw data.
> The infected cruise ship had a death rate of 0.7%
I agree that the Diamond Princess was particularly interesting because of the high testing rate. Your number is very clearly wrong, though. The actual numbers reported was 13 deaths in 712 cases, or 1.8%. They also have 55 unresolved cases, and someone who has been sick for this long is looking at worse odds than the general population.
> 1.3 million deaths is an order of magnitude more than what is being projected. Earlier this month, the range given was 100,000 - 240,000. Now this projection has been lowered first to 80,000 and now to 60,000:
First of all, those numbers are going down precisely because of the measures you're complaining about. Second, they're clearly implausible. The 60,000 estimate is from 9 days ago. Meanwhile, the current official count is just shy of 40,000, and the excess deaths have consistently been double or more of the estimate for COVID-19 deaths (Italy, for example, is reporting 6x [1], while NYC was until a recent change in their reporting showing 2x [2] - but we haven't seen these changes anywhere else in the country).
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-is-only-...
[2] https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-ho...
If we assume humans are slabs of talking meat which are worthless except for their economic properties (productivity and consumption), it is still not a likely economic win to let enormous numbers of them die because the economy is made of people. If you kill the people you kill the economy directly-- and, of course, people aren't going to continue like normal while others are dying around them regardless of what state policy is.
So you are making a false comparison of the economic cost, the alternative is not "do nothing, let millions of innocent people die, and have the economy continue as if nothing happened". That isn't a possible alternative-- the economy couldn't continue as if nothing had happened if millions have died or are dying.
Imagine for a moment, for the purpose of discussion, that we didn't need to keep food, medical supplies, power, etc flowing during the intervention. In that silly and unrealistic hypothetical it would be reasonable to pause the economy-- basically say "okay, for the next year all contracts are paused, all transfer of value prohibited, and in a year we just start 2020 over again for all legal and contractual purposes". Just like weekends are often disregarded in contracts but at a massive scale. No businesses would fail, nothing would change (except the people that died along the way).
It's not possible to actually do this fanciful thing, because, unfortunately, we still need to keep utilities, food, medical services, etc. running and because everything is interconnected you can't just pause everything else. But if we could it would be a completely reasonable response.
To the extent that, e.g. businesses fail due to this is a failure of our imagination and political will. Other than the small amount of actual damage done from spoiled goods (and deaths from the pandemic)-- all other economic consequences are a product of our beliefs and actions, and are not actual unavoidable losses in the same way that a death is. The stimulus is just one (half-assed) example of the potential ways that we can act to mitigate the direct economic harms while still protecting lives.
Of course, I do also think that people's lives have tremendous intrinsic value, but that isn't part of my argument here. Instead, I was attempting to argue that even a dispassionate spherical economist murder bot should-- if it were behaving rationally-- respect that the irrecoverable loss of many human lives is something of tremendous economic significance because of the central role of as agents and targets of all economic activity.
You're also disregarding the potential economic benefits of this disruption. Causing weak businesses to fail can be economically beneficial in the long run, as might the radical increase in telecommuting and video conferencing, or the development of more pandemic robust services (e.g. will we finally see automated grocery stores become a thing?) or the numerous other ways that this event might help the economy escape other local minima.
The idea that the economy would collapse due to the amount of people dying of coronavirus does not hold water. Even if widespread infection did occur, the mortality rate among working age people is well below 1%.
You can't argue against measure X by using the successful results of X to say that X didn't work in the first place!
And right that the question is to compare the actual death toll to the death toll that would have happened without social distancing. Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). That's 250,000 additional deaths. That would be $100M per death averted assuming a $2.5T cost of the social distancing measures - that's ~10% of GDP. The US so far is expecting losses about twice that.
There is substantial evidence for other viral infections that infection severity (spanning from asymptomatic to dead) is related to dosage.
There is limited information so far for covid19 but some informal evidence that this is true for it too: Young healthcare workers appear to be dying a a much higher rate than similarly healthy members of the public who are sars-cov-2 positive.
If this is the case, social distancing will reduce the number of people who get serious infections and reduce the number who die.
Even if not, preventing overload of the hospitals will significantly reduce the number who die. Delaying infections until we better know how to treat the disease from anti-virals to simply care techniques will almost certantly reduce the number who die.
> Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). T
CDC's projection was 1.7 million dead before accounting for hospital overload.
If you have a study that projects what the fatalities would have been with a shorter isolation period (e.g. only march and first two weeks of April), that would be noteworthy. Pointing to this early CDC study as a figure for what would have transpired had the economy not been shut down is not sound.
1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coro...
Not so, for example the mortalities from the diamond princess are _higher_ than the ones being used to drive those projections. The fact that it takes time for people to die has held down the estimated mortality during exponential case growth.
Effectively every reputable source is observing that the early death rate projections were substantially inflated. China's reported death rate is 0.5% - and they're the ones with the most experience with the virus. Germany only recent started random testing. They previously had a fatality rate of 2%, but after random testing they found that 14% of the population already had antibodies - thus lower the death rate down to 0.37% [1]. There's a vast difference between asking "out of the people who got sick enough to go to the hospital, what portion people infected with coronavirus died?" and "what portion of people infected with coronavirus died".
You're using old data. 2% of the diamond princess infected have died so far. Another 7% of the infected are still reported as not recovered yet.
I would love to be able to look inside your head and see what you think society would look like right now in the middle of an uncontained global pandemic with everyone just going about business as usual, continuing to pack bars and restaurants, no companies cutting back on jobs, etc. It's an utter, complete fantasy land.
That figure includes all mortality from pneumonia, a minority of which is caused by the seasonal flu.
"It's entirely fair to conclude" does not mesh with "Time will tell whether this was the right approach".
If the same protective effects could have been achieved with a less disruptive move, then your conclusion would be justifiable. It is not, however, at all appropriate to jump to that conclusion yet-- time has not told.
It will probably be years before good conclusions can be drawn from this due to the difficulty of correcting for starting conditions and intrinsic factors.
Sweden is a relatively insular, already 'socially distant' community. It appears infections there started with fewer parties later. So it would take considerable analysis using data that doesn't exist yet (including the eventual outcome in Sweden) to draw any conclusions about what might have happened had their approach been applied to, say, NYC.
Within the US-- a more comparable population-- there are many locations where the response was weaker and so far the results don't look especially good.
Ultimately the fact remains that the majority of the economic "losses" we have now are hallucinatory. When a building is bombed it is physically destroyed and the labor and most of the materials that went into building it are irretrievably lost. The people inside are killed and cannot be productive in the future. In our current crisis, our losses are primarily losses of confidence (sure, there are some cases of agricultural goods spoiling). The people our response have saved but left without work are still alive and can go back to work when the crisis is over, particularly if we act to make sure they're protected in ways other than their health. Even if we cared exclusively about the economic consequences of this event it would be extremely foolish to favor the increase destruction of productive human lives in order to optimize for short term market confidence.