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.
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.