It also could generate unnecessary strain on our health system that is already over capacity.
There's no need. Stay at home, stay protected, and don't take an unnecessary risk because you can't be mildly inconvenienced to save someone else's life.
I said their specific reasoning is a mild inconvenience.
And no, funnily enough, I'm unemployed (working on an early stage startup) and my savings are in the low triple digits -- total -- thanks to the pandemic. Might want to start limiting the number of assumptions you make.
A major disruption for a year isn't a "mild inconvenience." The longer this goes on, expect more and more people to feel like GP.
Sounds like a mild inconvenience to me. Any other reason wouldn't be.
There are people who set a monetary value on human life, and we have good estimates on that. What we don't have a good number for is what's the value of different degrees of freedom. Is a life where traveling is impractical, meeting people is challenging, you can't go to Disneyland, all that stuff, is it worth 75% of a life at 2019 levels? I don't mean this economically, I mean this as living life.
Could you elaborate on this? By EV you mean the expected value?
There's a high chance of a bad outcome, there's a tiny chance of death. The virus affects your lungs and brain, and who knows what other parts of the body we haven't been alerted to yet.
As time goes on we'll be back to "plague doors" for cafes and restaurants. We'll adjust our way of doing business so that we don't rely on having all the key people in a company in one room for irrelevant meetings (I mean we can dream, right?).
In March/April - I didn't leave my apartment for a month (besides tossing trash across the hall).
I still avoid most any indoor spaces, wear n95 masks and am not planning any plane travel (one of my biggest enjoyments) or visiting friends/family indoors this winter...
But I'm starting to seriously debate licking every door knob I pass just to get it over with already.