[ahdeanz]

You realize you’re talking about likely more than a million life years lost already? Potentially much more damage when you consider dalys due to long term sequilae as well.

How much more can we expect if things simply “get back to normal”. Hard to say but obviously a gigantic loss. I’m also highly skeptical of claims that #1 suicide, crime, violence have increased significantly. Source? Poverty/economic disruption is obviously a massive damage that cannot be understated either.

But I’m highly highly skeptical that countries who try to ignore the problem like Brazil, USA will end up economically more successful than countries with strong countermeasures like South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and many others. Beat the virus to fix the economy.

At some point there is an inflection point where it makes sense to “give up” and accept that countermeasures are more costly than the benefit they provide. Clearly every day we delay and have high rates of infection, and the longer the vaccine takes, we move closer to the “give up” side of the calculation. I’m not at all convinced we’ve reached that point yet and we certainly hadn’t reached it at the point the federal administration gave up.

https://mobile.twitter.com/erictopol/status/1276153119492186...

[tacocataco]

Perhaps delaying till the "give up" part is the point. Pushing the cost of the pandemic from the top to the bottom.

Except those people don't pay with money, they pay with blood.