It's not just about the dollar. We are social creatures, we thrive off of social interaction and contact and we benefit from community. Businesses, schools, churches, concerts, dancing, sporting events, all these things that give people joy and fun are shut down. We only get a few dozen trips around the sun. I do not want to spend my life cowering in fear and in a society that cowers in fear. I want kids playing in neighborhoods and playing ball, I want concerts on the regular, dancing in public squares and I want to live.

But to your point about the economy, we are seeing unprecedented damage to the worldwide economy from the shutdowns. It's not the virus that's doing this. It's the shutdowns. 40 million people are unemployed in the U.S. alone and rising, rapidly. This is unsustainable. The economy has to function or everything falls apart. And a big part of that functioning is travel and tourism and restaurants and it creates value and moves trade along. It's very important to re-establish those things.

Much of those deaths are in nursing homes with extremely vulnerable populations. I think its a tragic shame that many of these outbreaks occurred especially in nursing homes all over the northeast (NY, NJ, PA, CT, etc). However, once a patient gets moved to a nursing home, the average length they live is about 1 year. We can make nursing homes cleaner and safer and we should probably get those patients outside a bit more, but there's also only so much that can be done for people in the last months of their life.

Lockdowns vs no lockdown is an false dichotomy. The lockdown didn’t impact many people like myself, and many people can still be financially impacted even without a lockdown. Some people and businesses have actually been thriving. So your model is too black and white and doesn’t really match reality.

>> and is killing an unprecedented number of people.

Black death.

Bubonic plague.

Smallpox.

Malaria.

Measles.

Polio.

There have been many more virulent and many more destructive diseases than this one. Malaria in particular has been so destructive over thousands of years that it has modified human populations, forcing observable natural selection for traits such as sickle-cell anemia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria

You're correct that historically, there have been other illnesses hundreds of years ago that killed more people.

And in many developing countries, there are tragically many deaths caused by poor sanitation or healthcare.

However, this is a disease that has - even with incredibly draconian lockdowns and a global effort from every country to combat it - tragically killed nearly 350,000 people in a matter of months. And this is often in countries with state of the art healthcare systems, and every effort made to keep those people alive.

And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation. Ironically, I read that things like air travel and holidays actually worsened illnesses like this.

Imagine if we'd simply let the diseases run its course.

The thing that baffles me is the US - advanced Western nation - with a death toll of nearly 100,000 people. How is that even possible?

I am hoping we've seen the worst of it.

> historically, there have been other illnesses hundreds of years ago that killed more people.

AIDS has killed around 34 million people since 1981.

> AIDS has killed around 34 million people since 1981.

That's on average 100k deaths per year since 1981.

Right now we are in our first quarter of covid19 and the official death count is at 340k.

And the response to AIDS was malicious neglect for years in many countries. A large portion of those deaths were due to bigotry.

So I suppose somewhat like the situation in the US with COVID-19 today.

That’s .. staggering.

>> And as another commenter pointed out, this is often in countries not used to such scale of health disasters, as they have healthcare and good sanitation.

Polio.

"On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[15] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio

Measles too. These are diseases that hit the western world, the rich countries, killed thousands, in living memory. They causes panic. They caused quarantines. They caused social change. Polio lead directly to the disability rights movement. Wheelchair ramps as mandatory in all buildings: that's from polio.

Nursing home outbreaks are a huge chunk of those deaths.

I think if smallpox was spreading in America today it might also be a good idea close restaurants and offices to slow that down.

Those aren't killing people in rich countries with good healthcare and sanitation though