> Coronavirus pandemic will cause global famines of 'biblical proportions,' UN warns ... the coronavirus pandemic will push an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation.

> "While dealing with a Covid-19 pandemic, we are also on the brink of a hunger pandemic," David Beasley told the UN's security council. "There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of Covid-19 than from the virus itself."

source: google "covid19 famine"

If unemployment is better than death, why stop at doing this for Covid-19? For example, the flu kills quite a lot of people each year, and even though Covid-19 is somewhat more deadly that's counterbalanced by the fact that stronger, longer measures are required to stop it. Why not shut down parts of the economy every flu season?

(I've generally seen this kind of not one life argument go hand in hand with the idea that Covid-19 cannot be compared to any other cause of death, for obvious reasons.)

> Why not shut down parts of the economy every flu season?

The flu doesn't threaten healthcare capacity every season. A lot of focus is on the death statistics, but if someone recovers this does not mean they aren't a drain on hospital resources. Quite the opposite, it takes many more resources to nurse someone back to health than if they had died quickly. Corona is more contagious, leads to more hospitalizations as a proportion of those who are infected, and those hospitalizations are twice as long compared to the flu. And yes, it's also more deadly. If a hospital system collapses, then all other causes of death skyrocket. Our hospital system can handle flu without the economy shutting down, it can't handle corona. That's why we don't shut down every flu season.

"Data from China show that 20% of COVID-19 patients, though, are serious enough to get sent to the hospital. That's about 10 times more often than flu. Even though a great many people are hospitalized for the flu — the preliminary data for the 2018-19 flu season is nearly half a million — the rate of hospitalization is far lower: 1%-2% of cases, according to the CDC."

...

"Once a patient with a serious case of the coronavirus is hospitalized, the average stay is 11 days, according to a study based on January data from Wuhan — about twice as long as the five- to six-day average stay for flu.

The additional days mean additional stresses on the health care system. "To take care of intensive, really unwell people can often require two to three medical staff at one time, all in protective gear, for hours and hours," says Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/20/8154082...

Don't know why this is being downvoted. The flu kills tens of thousands a year, yet no one seemed to want to shut down the economy in the past. . .

10s of thousands vs 100s of thousands (or millions). Between higher mortality rate and higher level of transmission, C19 is FAR more deadly than seasonal flu.

The flu is a recurring problem. We can't avoid it.

COVID is (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (just as the 1918 flu was).

But death still occurs with the flu! Doesn't this mean you don't think life is more palateable than making money?

The same philosophical discussion can happen with respect to raising the speed limit by 5 miles per hour; it will result in more deaths... is it worth it?

But letting Covid-19 run unchecked is more akin to raising the speed limit by 50 miles per hour. The prudent choice is not to go with it.

But quarantining after the flu can "save lives". But my point is that it runs counter to the "That preserving life is more palatable than making money" argument. It's a tradeoff, in other words. If you REALLY wanted to "save lives", you can quarantine during every flu epidemic.

I feel like you're trying to make some sort of reductio ad absurdum argument.

Yes, the flu kills people. So do lightning strikes. Airplane crashes. And anvils falling out of windows. None at anywhere near the scale of C19.

There's a balance. I don't claim to know exactly where that is, but I'm confident that "meh, granny's gonna die anyways, and I want to buy stuff and get a pedicure" is a rather ghastly approach to the current situation.

What you gave is a strawman argument. Read what was originally written:

> What mindset? That preserving life is more palatable than making money? I'm ok with that. I'd rather be unemployed than dead.

You can "preserve life" by quarantining every flu epidemic. But this is an absurd argument. At some point the 'preserving life' argument breaks down.

Who made a "not one life" argument? I certainly didn't.

Self-quarantine/shelter-in-place isn't about saving everybody. It's about keeping ICU units below capacity so we don't have more deaths than necessary. It's about giving scientists and doctors time to develop treatment plans.

The mindset that we can avoid all risk by staying in lockdown is wrong. The most at risk are people over 70. They already have a 6%+ percent chance of dying every year.

The lockdown is to lower the curve, not to prevent all risk. Maybe your government said something different. In Netherlands it's about ensuring that the hospitals can still cope. Loads of procedures have been postponed so that they could deal with Corona.

The press in Netherlands showed the different ways of communicating a "lockdown". Though the actions were often similar, the way it was worded to the public differed quite a bit across countries. E.g. France talked about "going to war" (or something similar, cannot recall exactly). Spain and Italy both had different ways of announcing the same.

Trying to only protect/lock down people in a risk group (70+, plus overweight / lung problems) seems not to have worked. The virus spread already quickly despite a lockdown for all. It'll probably spread more quickly if that wasn't the case.

Are you unemployed?

Not currently, but have been in the past. It was preferable to death then and continues to be now.