It’s a false choice between the economy and people’s lives. The problem is that while labor economy was shut down, the financial system was not, so that rents and debts had to flow out of people that could not generate income, and the government has been ignoring the issue with nominal support.

Not freezing debts/rents across the entire economy is how this whole thing spins into a depression

Every expense is someone else's income. Freezing debts/rents doesn't solve anything. It just shifts the burden.

Ultimately we are losing the wealth that we otherwise would have generated. We are poorer and there's no way around that.

Yes, it shifts the burden from people who work for a living, to people who's living is worked for by other people.

The former are far more important, and numerous than the latter. I eat butter, I don't eat dividends.

If you're a renter you live in a home that a landlord built or paid someone else to build. And if people stop paying rent then they stop paying people to build. Construction workers lose their jobs and our housing problems are made worse.

And don't have any illusions about the rich losing here. Most units are owned by small time landlords who will be wiped out by a rent freeze. Those units will be gobbled up on the cheap by rich people that can borrow money at cheap rates.

> And if people stop paying rent then they stop paying people to build. Construction workers lose their jobs and our housing problems are made worse.

So what? They've already stopped paying people to build. Construction workers have lost their jobs already. While having to keep paying their rent, or mortgage.

This is a temporary disruption, and needs temporary, stop-gap measures to stop the bleeding. Nobody's advocating to stop all rents forever.

> And don't have any illusions about the rich losing here. Most units are owned by small time landlords who will be wiped out by a rent freeze.

1. No, they aren't. Most units are owned by real estate companies.

2. Couple it with a mortgage freeze, and none of them will be wiped out. You can, in fact, kick this can up the hill until it hits the capital markets...

The “lockdown” is a Fabian strategy; one of the goals is to preserve our ability to stage an economic comeback after the health crisis has been resolved. In the near term, the economy is toast no matter what we do (short of a well oiled contact tracing and isolating machine).

This paper seems to suggest there isn’t really a tension between protecting people’s health and saving the economy: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560

You are correct that the lockdown measures are a choice and not a natural consequence of the virus though.

Even if widespread shelter-in-place orders were not in effect, if the virus spread through a lot of the people in a town, you can bet that people wouldn't be going out as usual. Nobody* will be eating at restaurants if they hear dozens of people in town got sick while eating out and died because local hospitals are over capacity.

*there's always somebody

Sure, we can let a million folks in the USA die because we love our capitalism, but 80%+ of the USA disagrees with that false dichotomy.

I don't think that's true. The mindset I've consistently seen is that people do agree with the dichotomy, and are just willing to sacrifice the economy because they don't think it's very important. How many times has the line been trotted out that we can't sacrifice human lives for the sake of the economy?

First of all, that number is clearly exaggerated. No current evidence supports the claim that a million people in the USA dying of covid is remotely plausible.

Now to the substance of your argument: this has little to do with capitalism. If most people are not working for a long period of time, in any society, even a non-capitalist one, then that society will rapidly become dramatically materially poorer.

We make choices to improve material conditions at possibly increased health risks all the time. Longevity is not the only metric for overall quality of life.

I would happily accept some increased risk of my own death for the lockdown to be over. Correctly navigating the tradeoff requires figuring out how much increased risk of death is acceptable, not asserting that it’s zero.

It's not just Covid. If the hospitals are overwhelmed, that car accident you get into means you might not be able to get medical care, causing a small issue to become deadly. You may not be able to get treated for a heart attack.

Further, we are seeing people still testing positive and having health problems over a month after first symptoms. If your entire supply chain is taken out, essential or not, you can end up with larger problems than when you started. If you think it's a problem that the meat packing plant has to close after a single case, wait until 75% of the plant is symptomatic.

Finally, the solution is to have enough tests and contact tracing so that people can confidently open up, knowing that we can stop the rate of transmission. This shutdown should be used to prepare for a way we can safely reopen, a la South Korea.

Without a lockdown, most of the country will eventually be infected. NYC currently has 21000 excess deaths, so extrapolating that to the rest of the country would mean 21000*328M / 10M = 690,000 excess deaths. That's assuming that nobody else in NYC is going to die of Covid 19, even after lifting the lockdown, so this is an extremely conservative projection, and it's already close to 1M deaths.

What's implausible about this? Is Covid 19 less lethal outside NYC? Can R remain below 1 anywhere in the country, without a lockdown?

Sorry, you're right. I did the arithmetic wrong, thinking that 1M deaths would represent 3% of the population, instead of 0.3%. My mistake!

The rest of my point still stands.

I mean I agree it's plausible, but it also seems likely that it's more lethal in NYC because of population density.

More infectious, sure? But more lethal? Why?

Lots of current evidence supports the claim. COVID is clearly more contagious than the flu, and herd immunity (without a vaccine) will require between 60-70% of the population to become infected. That's 229M people. COVID is also more fatal than the flu. Its IFR is roughly 1%. So 1% of 229M is 2.3M fatalities, and roughly 20M additional hospitalizations.

If you believe the IFR is lower, say .5% (still over 5x the flu), then you still have the same number of hospitalizations, but just 1.15M fatalities.

If you believe the IFR is the same as the flu (0.1%), then you'll still have 20M hospitalizations and 230K fatalities.

Say we're really lucky, and the IFR is the same as the flu, and we find a therapeutic drug to help treat it, dropping the IFR to half of the flu (0.05%), you have 114800 fatalities, but still the 20M hospitalizations.

The math is just brutal. What will the impact be of 20M hospitalizations, to say nothing of the deaths?