Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

I think that too much discussion of the the costs of the lockdown are along the lines of "But what about the economy?!!!" to which, people quite reasonably respond, "people's lives are more important." When it's all couched in terms of "the economy" then it comes over as a plea not to imperil the profits of shareholders and business owners, which is not exactly compassionate.

However, there are a whole load of other impacts, which are much more directly deleterious on everyone's wellbeing. Not just the loss of livelihood for those who are already struggling, but mental and physical health issues, loss of school time for kids etc. etc. I don't think the cumulative effect of these across an entire population of 65 million has really been weighed up against the threat to the sections of the population who are more vulnerable to the virus.

To put it another way, I was discussing this the other day with one of my more pragmatic acquaintances. I put to her the twitter-friendly rebuttal to the Trumpian message (that it's ok to let a few old people die to keep things going), which is "ok, choose which 2% of the people you know you'd choose to die." Her response was basically "if it came right down to it, that's actually an easy decision to make." In a way she's right; it's a decision that we should put off for as long as we possibly can and find every way to avoid making, but if we absolutely have to choose between losing some of the elderly vs. a potential lifetime of mental health problems and educational delay for children across the entire country, it wouldn't be a coin-flip, we know what we'd chose.