OK, agreed, because of hardship.
But a lot of that hardship is due to enormous wealth inequality (I'm assuming you're a US person). How about you don't have titanic inequalities instead? Would that work?
The science behind reducing transmission of the virus is sound. What's going to get people killed in the near term is twofold: people undermining or protesting the quarantine orders; and people who need to go to work in order to support their families and not get evicted, who end up contracting the virus and either dying or spreading it to others. The former is either due to some kind of fucked up value system that interprets a temporary public health quarantine as some kind of intolerable infringement of rights. The latter is because the American form of capitalism leaves so many people so far behind that they can never get ahead.
If the decrease is bigger than the increase, you will see the total drop.
[0] Milner, Allison et al. “Long-term unemployment and suicide: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” PloS one vol. 8,1 (2013): e51333. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051333
1) You're looking at net lives, and there's no particular reason to think we're net negative yet. Let's imagine a brief lockdown to avoid overwhelming the emergency rooms with people needing ventilators is very net positive. And let's imagine crippling the economy by fully locking down everything until a vaccine passes clinical trials in 18 months is very net negative. Even if you accept these as true, we might have weeks to go until the crossover point arrives...or we might have already passed it.
2) Which brings us to the next point - even if we're already in net negative territory, deaths from Covid-19 are (hopefully) front loaded; they're happening now. Deaths three years from now because the long term economic growth rate is 0.2% lower than it otherwise would have been are still in the future. I linked to some studies suggesting the GFC cost a fair chunk of lives in the end, but you wouldn't have been able to detect any of that the week after Lehman failed; the fallout had yet to land.
And finally:
3) Coming back to the point in the linked article, there's more to life than strict maximising quality-adjusted life years. There's a lot of ways you could, in principle, save lives via a stroke of a pen. Boxing, white water rafting, surfing, diving, and mountain climbing are all shockingly dangerous sports. We could ban them! It'd straight up save lives. Should we? I, for one, would strongly argue no. But that cuts both ways. Even if we had inarguably correct data showing continuing the lockdowns was starting to cost lives, that's the starting point for the debate, not the conclusion. We don't (and shouldn't) just do the things that would save the most lives.
A better example would be "let's end all farm subsidies for sugar and tobacco." You could arguably include corn here, as well. Go a little further, and you can start talking about national sugar and tobacco taxes. All these measures simply increase the price of sugar and tobacco, which has been proven to reduce consumption, and would certainly have the effect of reducing obesity and cancer.
I find it a lot harder to argue against those things than to say we should ban surfing, boxing, or rafting, because a few people get injured or die every year doing them.
You have to remember the economic slowdowns started before the lockdowns were in place. Even without lockdown we were in for a lot of economic pain.
Interesting, I read a different view: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/28/a-rece...
I am not sure how to reconcile this.
We know that recessions cost lives. One study (published in The Lancet, so worth taking a second look at) suggested 500k excess cancer deaths from the global financial crisis[1], and another study (published in the BMJ) suggested that excess suicides in 2009 alone across the US and 53 other countries totalled some 5k[2]. I don't know of a single comprehensive effort, but we know recessions reduce the resources available at the margins for food, medicine and shelter, and increase the suicide rate. The net effect for something like the GFC seems likely to be on the order of tens of thousands of deaths (and perhaps significantly higher), and the recession caused in part by Covid-19 and in part by our reaction to Covid-19 seems to be within an order of magnitude of the GFC.
Thus, it seems fairly obvious that at least some responses to Covid-19 would cost more lives than they saved. If you're evaluating a measure that, let's say, would save X lives from Covid-19, but would cause the resulting recession to go from, Y% as bad as the GFC to Z% as bad as the GFC, there are absolutely values for X, Y and Z which would make the measure net negative on lives.
I'd be happier if that tradeoff got acknowledged a bit more often, even in a perfunctory "well, we're clearly MILES away from the break even point, so let's ignore it" sort of way. If you pretend that tradeoffs don't exist, you're unlikely to reach an optimal decision.
[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/25/financial-crisis...
[2]: https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5239