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by LastZactionHero 2229 days ago
As an example, 9 million people die each year due to hunger or hunger-related issues, many of them children. 135 million face food insecurity. Due to lockdowns and recession, the World Food Program estimates the toll will double this year. And hunger is just one cause of death that a recession can lead to (suicides, substance abuse, etc).

Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.

https://www.wfp.org/news/covid-19-will-double-number-people-...
2 comments
dragonwriter 2229 days ago
> Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives.

That's a real issue in the developing world; in the developed world the resources exist to buffer the temporary additional low-end economic impact; not doing so effectively is a policy choice (and, in practice, a deliberate active one made when the alternative of providing the aid is presented), not an inherent corollary of lockdowns.

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LastZactionHero 2228 days ago
> That's a real issue in the developing world; in the developed world the resources exist to buffer the temporary additional low-end economic impact

That seems like a pretty sterile way to describe it.

Right now, in the (presumably) developed US, 1 in 5 children don't have enough food, 3x the amount during 2008. That's a result of years of policy choices, but one particularly policy choice caused it to spike. If there's a resource buffer, it's not buffering.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the-covid...

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dragonwriter 2228 days ago
> Right now, in the (presumably) developed US, 1 in 5 children don't have enough food, 3x the amount during 2008. That's a result of years of policy choices, but one particularly policy choice caused it to spike.

Yes, the policy choice not provide the kind of mass aid (whether directly to citizens or through firms in a way which reasons the mass of the citizenry to protect empmoyment and pay) to the population that pretty much every other industrialized country facing this crisis has, even the ones (like Sweden) without mandatory lockdowns.

The US federal response to COVID-19, both in narrow public health measures and broader, including economic policy, measures (and structurally much of this has to be done at the federal level because of the way state and federal financing works) has been nothing short of mass murder by depraved indifference.

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CryptoPunk 2228 days ago
Life expectancy correlates strongly with per capita GDP in the developed world.

The losses in GDP caused by lockdowns will therefore very likely have a cost in lives in the developed world too.

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mytherin 2229 days ago
> Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.

The choice between "saving people" vs "economy" is a false choice. Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run. People that live in fear of the virus will not consume, and lockdowns reduce the amount of time that the virus is out there.

You can force people to go back to work, but you can't force people to consume.

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RealityVoid 2228 days ago
> Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run.

It might. We're not really sure. Either way, I think OP has a good point. It is not entirely impossible that we do the lockdown, still same number of people die and we also grind economic activity to a halt leading to other kinds of shortages. If this is what will happen, then the lockdown is a would be a bad choice. Sweden actually is banking on this. They might be wrong, but it's not an entirely crazy stance, there is a reasoning behind it.

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