[showdeadtest]

That’s about a month’s worth of deaths. The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation. We are past that. And it’s completely besides the point—-it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.

[kbenson]

> That’s about a month’s worth of deaths.

Looking at current number of deaths as the outcome for the decision to open stuff up only makes sense if you think we would have seen the same infection rate.

If the infection rate is high enough and fast enough, we surpass the healthcare system's capacity to help with hospitalization, and then we see a large increase in the mortality rate for those infected, as some of those with bad, but not fatal infections that recovered in the hospital don't recover out of the hospital. The faster the spread, the worse (higher) that number is.

> The economic impact would be roughly that of everybody taking a really long vacation.

People come back from vacations. The economic impact would be more like those people all quit at the same time.

> it does not seem like that is the calculus going into our policy decisions here in August.

It is. They're looking at worst case scenarios for COVID-19, and how likely they are, compared to worst case scenarios for the economy, and how likely they are.

Worst case for the economy is a depression, which may take years or decades to recover from, but the workers are still there, still trained, and we can hopefully get them back to work with stimulus, even if it takes a long time.

Worst case for COVID-19 is that instead of hundreds of thousands of dead, we see millions of dead. What's the economic impact of one of every 50 or 100 families loses a parent, and how that affects they flexibility and ability to recover from financial bumps? What's the impact to Apple or Google if a high level exec that's spears a division dies (what's happened at Apple since Job died, and he had plenty of time to groom a successor)? What about the 20 employees of small business that was struggling but surviving when the owner dies? The economic impact of people actually disappearing forever is sometimes equivalent of the cost and time to train a replacement (which is generally multiple months of salary for any non-trivial position), and that's when it can actually be replaced adequately.

Even if you want to completely ignore the humanitarian aspect of it, there's good economic reason to not want people to die, and why locking things down, while economically disastrous, maybe still be less economically disastrous than NOT doing so.

[showdeadtest]

I think you are arguing against a man made out of straw. People do not want to live like this, regardless of economics or theory. You can shout argument after argument; it won’t change that more and more people are going to mingle.

[kbenson]

> People do not want to live like this, regardless of economics or theory.

That's fine. People are going to do what they're going to do. I'm not quite willing to let them do it behind nonsense arguments and justifications though.

If someone's unwilling to give up going to the gym, so be it. When they couch it (as some have here) as them actually doing it for the benefit of everyone else by helping the economy, I'm going to loudly and vehemently call bullshit.

If they say they just aren't willing to change and don't care about any of the data, well as long as they actually know the data, then I'll have nothing more to discuss with them.

[showdeadtest]

We need policy that works for people, not policy that wins debates. That’s all I’m saying.

[kbenson]

What I'm saying is that if someone shows they are completely unwilling to either look at the facts, or just don't care that their actions have such an outsized negative impact, what can I do? They are literally holding everyone else hostage because they don't want to change. That's not negotiation, and the only "policy" that will work for them is "whatever they want".

That said, I don't think this is how people are. I think people are living in a deep cognitive dissonance and refusing to see the facts, not acknowledging them and saying they don't care.

That's not a policy problem, that a problem of educating people that do not want to be educated. Should the rest of the populace just shift our views away from reality so people that don't want to face it can get a better deal out of some policy? That won't lead to an acceptable outcome either, when the policy in question is about public safety.

[throwout_covid]

To clarify, your original argument was made in bad faith. You don't like sacrificing for the greater good, so you'll make arguments to appear substantive, but really, you want to 'mingle'.

[showdeadtest]

The original idea was that there was no way that policy was being informed by the trade-off described by parent, so it was a moot point. I think I was not clear enough.