[s1artibartfast]

I think the comments about suicide are a bit of a red herring.

There are many reasons why death rates increase with economic hardship and I do not think this is a significant one. More significant are changes to factors which are already leading causes of death (cancer and heart disease). In the short term, examples are how many treatable cancers are not being found or how many people are skipping other medical procedures. In the long term, how many life-years would have been saved with tax money which is lost. Even with socialized medicine, countries have budgets which need to balanced, and not every procedure is available to everyone who could benefit.

This study [1] estimated 260,000 extra deaths from treatable cancers from 2008 to 2010 in the OECD. One should ask how will this scale when additional diseases are considered and how the current economic impact will compare.

I'm not saying that I know what the correct choice is here, and perhaps we will never know, but it isn't as simple as saving lives vs suicide.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[jacquesm]

And then there are the factors on the other side of the ledger: fewer traffic deaths, ironically - fewer COPD related deaths because of significantly improved air quality. And many more. This is not a simple problem by any stretch of the imagination and trying to make it seems as though only one or two factors are suddenly dominant and should be given precedence without taking into account other effects of larger or equal magnitude and possibly with inverted sign makes it all about as useful as badly informed guesswork.

[s1artibartfast]

I wholeheartedly agree. My hope is that people can at least recognize that there is a complex risk benefit problem and encourage or at least permit our health experts to asses the problem.

Unfortunately, the pubic ( at least in the US) is dividing into camps which largely ignore this fundamental question. Either any action which which increases covid deaths is amoral, or the economy should be the primary concern. In reality, the real question of how to optimize quality adjusted life years has been squeezed out of the conversation.

[jacquesm]

Part of the reason is that the US tends to treat any major political issue as though it is a spectator sport rather than as something society will have to find a good solution for.