[stupac2]

36.5 million jobs lost, or about 428 lives ruined for every life lost to the coronavirus.  Add the fact that typically two other people depend on those people for revenue to pay the bills, and you have about 1,283 lives harmed for every life lost.

I still don't understand why you are framing this that way. The economic fallout is not for the sake of the lives lost, it's for the sake of the lives saved. Not to mention the many of us who have no desire to end up in the hospital for several weeks on an oxygen machine, as several of my young, healthy, no-comorbidity friends have been. My cousin's sister-in-law has lost 11 friends and relatives to COVID-19 already, and she has been stricken with COVID-19 and bedridden herself for two weeks. None of those people count in the "deaths" category but I can assure you they all experienced severe, long-term consequences as a result of this. (And at a minimum, all the survivors lost weeks of work while they were too ill to stand up, let alone go to work.)

But by your tally, all of that suffering counts for nothing, as well as the avoidance of the suffering of the many, many others. Seems like a completely wrong-headed way to view this.

It's not just that, but losing a job doesn't ruin a life, many of these jobs will come back, especially if there's a coherent policy response. The only way to prevent this sort of collapse is to prevent the virus from reaching us, which is long since gone. After that you're just talking about managing the pain, which we've done abysmally. Hopefully the next relief bill comes through, otherwise we're looking at enduring an entirely preventable depression because of federal incompetence.

[stupac2]

36.5 million jobs lost, or about 428 lives ruined for every life lost to the coronavirus.  Add the fact that typically two other people depend on those people for revenue to pay the bills, and you have about 1,283 lives harmed for every life lost.

I still don't understand why you are framing this that way. The economic fallout is not for the sake of the lives lost, it's for the sake of the lives saved. Not to mention the many of us who have no desire to end up in the hospital for several weeks on an oxygen machine, as several of my young, healthy, no-comorbidity friends have been. My cousin's sister-in-law has lost 11 friends and relatives to COVID-19 already, and she has been stricken with COVID-19 and bedridden herself for two weeks. None of those people count in the "deaths" category but I can assure you they all experienced severe, long-term consequences as a result of this. (And at a minimum, all the survivors lost weeks of work while they were too ill to stand up, let alone go to work.)

But by your tally, all of that suffering counts for nothing, as well as the avoidance of the suffering of the many, many others. Seems like a completely wrong-headed way to view this.

It's not just that, but losing a job doesn't ruin a life, many of these jobs will come back, especially if there's a coherent policy response. The only way to prevent this sort of collapse is to prevent the virus from reaching us, which is long since gone. After that you're just talking about managing the pain, which we've done abysmally. Hopefully the next relief bill comes through, otherwise we're looking at enduring an entirely preventable depression because of federal incompetence.