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...
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 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.
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 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.
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.
(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.)