[euudheehdy]

Most of the terrible economic outcomes have been due to the lockdowns not the actual deaths. Losing 1% of the population isn't a massive economic blow when that 1% is predominantly composed of no and low income groups, it is however a moral blow. The difference is important however because, while early on total lock-downs made sense, the reality is that if only 1% of the population is at risk of death then the other 99% should be working to minimize the cost of supporting the most vulnerable in countries where a full viral suppression is unlikely.

[bachmeier]

Sorry, but this is a pretty confused post, and your first sentence shows a lot of the problems with it.

> Most of the terrible economic outcomes have been due to the lockdowns not the actual deaths.

First, it's not lockdowns vs deaths. The biggest factor by far in the US was the existence of the virus. https://privwww.ssrn.com/abstract=3631180

"While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 percentage points of this. Individual choices were far more important"

But you don't need a fancy study. States that didn't have lockdowns saw similar economic declines to other states, even though they should have experienced a boom on the border as people traveled in to do business if it was the lockdown.

Second, deaths are not the only cost. People get sick, too, and it's a pretty big deal for many of them even if you don't see it on TV. It's possible they'll have permanent organ damage and shorter lives. Those people call in sick, or worse, they go to work and get others sick.

Third, if you let it get out of control, you overwhelm the hospital system. It's hard to see how that helps.

[gnusty_gnurc]

> It's possible they'll have permanent organ damage and shorter lives.

It's clear to me that people use this argument as a virtual escape hatch from any critical argument about the response to coronavirus.

We don't really even have a specific number of how many people were infected - never mind the number of people with long-term effects. We don't even really know the long-term effects (and descriptions are relatively vague). It's probable that the prevalence and severity of those effects are overstated.

Given the evidence so far, it seems reasonable to assume the overwhelming majority of healthy people are not at risk from the virus. And appealing to things we don't know and assuming the worst-case isn't realistic - it's a convenient way to justify medieval mitigation methods that decimate the economy and violate civil liberties, while casting any objectors as misanthropes.

[saiya-jin]

You don't know exactly who is going to die though. If you would go by the risk factors, then just a single one - obesity, would put tens of millions of americans into risk group.

And similar logic can be applied to many other countries struggling with obesity (latino, south east asians and so on).

Now we put in cardiovascular, lung and immunity issues. Add older people. And suddenly its not 1% but much, much larger group.