[alkonaut]

> With lives at stake,

I think we must remember that "lives at stake" aren't just Covid infected. People will die in 10 years from budget cuts coming from things we do now. This isn't about counting bodies in the spring of 2020 (only).

[tharne]

That's pure speculation and not very informative to the debate. Basically you're saying, "In a decade the government will spend less money on a number of unspecified things and those cuts are going to kill people in some unspecified way".

You could just as easy make a number of different equally speculative arguments, such as:

"This will force drastic cuts in spending, including military budgets, leading to fewer deaths from war".

"This will kill a lot of the elderly and chronically ill, drastically reducing government costs for things like healthcare, socially security and pensions, freeing up money for other things".

"This will leads to more people moving to suburbs, increasing carbon emissions."

"This will lead to more people working remotely, decreasing carbon emissions."

What this pandemic has taught us so far is that we're really bad at predicting the future. In the meantime, we should try to minimize the death toll in the here and now.

[alkonaut]

> What this pandemic has taught us so far is that we're really bad at predicting the future. In the meantime, we should try to minimize the death toll in the here and now.

While I agree that it’s hard and speculative, I don’t agree with this. We have to minimize total suffering and lives lost and in the long term even if it means using very difficult predictions.