COVID-19: Philosophical Question

How much is a life worth to you? 350 million lives at stake. At a million a life you’re surpassing more than the worlds combined wealth.

 

Solid question and one I've been wrestling with in my own mind since last week. Part of me says that we should just continue business as normal and just let what happen, happen other than going with some economic stimulus packages to hopefully counteract the economic downturn that's happening globally. This is cold-hearted, but if people die, they die...not much we can do about it if we want to keep living normally.

But, what keeps me from moving in that direction, is that lives aren't just numbers, but actual human beings that have loved-ones and people that care about them. That's the sentimental part, but it goes along with the intellectual part that we really don't have an idea of what this can do the longer it's out there. Sure, Korea and China (if you believe them) have sort of plateaued their numbers, but they still haven't found a vaccine or cure for this thing yet. On top of that, what if it mutates into other strains and becomes more deadly? It's that last part that makes it where, even though probably almost every American will get this at some point, the scary part. Without a cure or vaccine, we're tempting fate and things could end up turning much worse than what's even projected as a worst-case scenario right now.

 

It's a good question. I think there are untold unintended consequences either way. It's a devilish dilemma.

If you let it run its course without strong interventions to flatten the epidemic curve, imagine the impact on healthcare workers. They are already contracting the virus at an alarming rate. If you make the world's entire medical sector ill at basically the same time and convince a lot of young people to leave the field entirely, that could be an enormous and long-range impact.

Nobody knows just how bad the economic impact will be, either way. The market is just responding fearfully to an unpredictable but dire-looking situation. But with all these companies shuttering, and all these low-wage employees and middle-wage employees out of work and small businesses throwing up their hands, you would think the recession would be significant.

What if you have strong worldwide intervention that flattens the curve but launches something not unlike the Depression, so that you'll have people starving to death in some parts of the world?

If nothing else, this kind of question underlines why we should should elect smart, data-driven people of high character to every single office possible. Not necessarily charismatic people or recycled TV personalities. Maybe people will vote from now on with "who would I want to protect me in a huge crisis" instead of "who is entertaining," but I won't hold my breath. Le sigh.

 

This gets painted as a "Life vs Economy" argument, but that isn't really fair.

Both are intermixed.

If you let it run rampant but try to keep the economy running the massive death toll will hurt the economy as well as a lot of the dead will be workers still.

If you do crazy intervention to reduce the death toll but cause a global depression, a lot of people will die as a result from suicide, depression, etc.

I think that we are trying to thread the needle. Flatten the curve while damaging the economy and then try to re-open later. I can't imagine that leaders around the world are seriously considering a total global shutdown for a super prolonged period of time. This is a hail mary imo.

 

Where's option 3 in this Trilemma?

Pretend everything is good in the world (myself especially) and let God sort them out.

 

Can't give this enough likes

 

HHAHAHAAHAHAH as if our prom king and queen two party system were capable of doing such a thing

one gave us a reality tv, 4th grade reading, narcissistic, moron and the other a creepy, hateful, touchy feely, old man...

 

Wuhan had total one confirmed case yesterday.

Seeing this, for any government, the answer is clear: do their best to contain the virus and it is the only way to save the economy. China's GDP growth dropped to - 26% (from +6% to -26%) in February, but everyone agree it is worth it. Even Stock markets did not drop when China was in on it..

If surrender, the virus will kill 3% of population this round and will kill another 3% the other round until the vaccine is invented.

 

Wuhan is going to get reinfected.

 

You hold this off with all the might we have in our bones until a vaccine comes around. You can't let half the population get this, we can't just welcome overrun hospitals with millions dead.

 

I tend to think that the government officials all know that isolation for longer than 2 months is not sustainable economically, and there's the reality that in a few weeks they'll have to start lifting restrictions on restaurants, retail, etc. which will for sure lead to more deaths but have a trade off of getting the economy back working again.

My guess is Trump himself will do everything he can to open business back up as soon as the "curve" slows even a little bit. I don't think he'll win that battle at first, but eventually I do think we'll have to deal with this virus just being another Strep/Flu/HIV, but probably way more deadly. Right now everyone just seems to be hoping and praying that someone can come up with a halfway decent treatment so people can deal with just getting it yearly, and getting some meds that help fight through it.

But yes... I think eventually the world leaders, especially Trump, will deal with the acceptance of this virus just being a part of our daily lives, and accept the risks in order to get the economy back up and running.

 

This is the biggest problem. We can have philosophical disagreements between candidates, but electing idiots to office is dangerous. Sadly, the citizens of US appear to be filled with idiots who only vote for R and D. My social media really makes the idiots stand out on both sides of the coin. It pains me that some of these people have masters, PhDs, are leaders of churches, etc etc.

I mean look at the village idiots here that defend their elected leaders to no avail. I don't understand why either. It's not a sign of weakness when you can admit that mistakes were made. No person is perfect, but how they decide to tackle difficult situations really makes a huge difference how we can tackle things.

For example, this COVID 19. We've known about it for months, we knew it was eventually going to hit. Yet somehow, our the idiots at the federal level did not even bother preparing for this. Imagine, we could of stocked up on supplies and been able to immediately test as soon as the outbreak began here. Instead, we are lagging behind, our local leaders are having to make tough economic choices and it's possible we could of tackled this much earlier without collapsing our economy. Even bills could of been prepared by our house and senate leaders ahead of time in preparation for what was coming. Instead, we reacted, rather than be proactive.

Our government failed us and it sucks to be helpless watching them make mistake after mistake. There are good leaders out there, but this is always a damn popularity contest.

 

Asia is finding their own ways that doesn't require the heavy boot of government overreach or roaming thugs breaking down social gatherings in the name of public safety. It's not a total lockdown for everywhere because both the government and public are working together to find a common ground to halt the spread. It involves detailed tracking and identifying people who are infected (overreach for some), and general best practices to contain and limit the unknowns.

If we're in the same state of hysteria and panic in two months, it's definitely the fault of leadership and the lack of executing solid ideas to survive in this current reality. Hoping is not the answer here.

 

It's a very valid question. But I want to point out one thing - if you let this run wild, it's not 3%. Evidence suggest case fatality of 5+% (health system collapse) and that does not count death due to other illness that the system fail to support.

If we want to go down this path, i think we need to first do everything possible within a small window of time to reduce that fatality rate (vaccine, treatment, health care capacity, ...) ...

Plus, we have evidences that other Countries have some success, at least initially... SK, China, Taiwan, ...

 

What are you talking about? Donny just said he knew this was a bigly issue from the beginning. They all did...now.

It's just the government is a slow liberty stealing un-American beast, which is why he's in power to fix it!

 

Drain the swamp baby!!