[saalweachter]

> You can quantify these with numbers.

You can!

Using the age statistics from NY and the Social Security actuarial tables, we're currently losing something like 11.75-17.1 years of life per death, depending on whether you weight towards the life expectancy at the beginning or end of each age bracket. The current update to the "dialysis standard" for the value of a YoQL is $129,000, so we're currently losing $1.5-2.2 million per death.

If the true fatality rate is 0.66% (https://www.livescience.com/death-rate-lower-than-estimates....), and 70% of the population would catch it if it is not contained before "herd immunity" is reached, that would put the total number of expected deaths in the US at around 1.52 million. If we're expected something like 100-200 thousand people to die even with the measures currently being taken, then we're averting 1.4 million deaths and that amounts to a savings of about $2-3 trillion worth of human life.

If $2-3 trillion is suspiciously similar to the magnitude being thrown around for various "coronavirus relief bills", well, it's probably only a little bit of a coincidence.