You say shutting down the economy so casually, as if it has no impact on an infectious disease spreading during a pandemic.
If there hadn't been any shutdown, it would lead to a tenfold increase in infections and an even higher than tenfold increase in death as hospitals will be completely overwhelmed and unable to provide normal healthcare.
But if you think a 20x death rate from the nr 1 cause of death (heart disease), preventable by a lockdown for a few more months as a vaccine is rolled out, is no big deal, then there really is no arguing with you.
I am not making the argument that it's "just a flu", but I will make the argument that it's "just death". Death is. Only a sheltered person is emotionally distraught because of this; and in turn, only a person who cannot handle this perspective would deem it logical to permanently damage society in order to reduce this number.
I am all for protecting older folks, even at great expense. We should have isolated every old folks' home and done everything possible to keep them COVID-free and well stocked with everything they need. These folks have served their time in society and deserve to be cared for with a higher standard than others. It's highly unfortunate that the exact opposite thing happened; I hope that we learn a lesson from this.
However, when we're talking about the non-elderly, it seems that the vast majority of people who are dying are simply in bad shape / vitamin deficient / etc. Sorry, I don't see any reason I should care about their death any more than I would care about it if they died from heart disease, which is almost certainly going to get most of the people in that demographic eventually anyway, if they don't get hit by a car first. It's sad for their families, and for us it's just a warning to get some sunshine and exercise ever so often, which is literally all it takes to put yourself in the group of people who have a massively high survival rate. In fact, we've all had a whole year with literally nothing else to do for amusement to have gotten in good shape during. At this point, anyone who is still ignoring that has made their choice.
It's about putting things in perspective. 50-100k people die from the flu every year in America for the past decade and nobody cared before and nobody will care about that 10 years from now either unless it's a really slow news day.
> there really is no arguing with you
There's plenty of arguing with me. Convince me why I should care about people who die of one disease when I already didn't care about all the people dying of a different one. That's fundamentally what this comes down to: blowing that level of care out of proportion while denying people the right to make their own decisions about what level of personal risk they are comfortable with.
But wait now, while you're deciding for them how they should live you're not accepting that they could also ask you to live differently during this pandemic. So when they take personal risk, like going grocery-shopping, and get infected, does that mean they have a lesser claim to a hospital bed than you, who wants to "make their own decision" about the risk of spreading the virus? Or do you accept the fact that an old fat guy might just block the ICU you could happen to need tomorrow?
But lockdown and the other measures aren't just meant to protect the high risk individuals. We still don't understand how the virus affects many lower risk individuals long term because it's a very new virus. Strictly looking at the "death rate" may make us miss that significantly large portions of recovered individuals (from the lower death risk segment) develop long term health issues that may significantly reduce their lifetime expectation.
And yet another reason for lockdown and the other measures is to keep the health system afloat for the other, much higher death risk, health conditions. If our entire ICU capacity is occupied with COVID patients we won't be able to offer the same quality treatment to much higher risk situations like in emergencies (accidents of every kind) not to mention the COVID death rate itself may spike a lot higher if we can't provide the same quality of health care that we've been able to so far.
What are you talking about? 3500 died in a single day, that's a 9/11. Multiply it by tenfold like you said, and do it for a year, you're looking at 12.7 million Americans dying alone. Is that a death rate you don't care about? For comparison, the 1st world war, second world war, vietnam war, korean war, war in afghanistan, war in iraq, combined, gets you to about 0.45m casualties.
And that's in one year and one country. On a global scale it'd be insane, and again, just one year. A year in which a vaccine is rolled-out and can end the lockdown. Ending that lockdown now without having rolled-out the vaccine makes no sense.
