Do you drive a car? If so, by your logic you value your own convenience more than human lives, because driving kills over a million people and maims tens of millions more people every year.
The point is that most people generally don't consider a response like this is justified for the sake of reducing deaths from automobile accidents (I've never seen anybody argue that everyone should not leave their houses, to prevent auto accidents).
Is it any less reasonable than accusing somebody of valuing their own leisure more than human lives? The only difference between banning private cars to save lives and quarantining everybody to save lives is quantitative. Banning private cars saves fewer lives, but also causes much less economic damage. Opposing either implies some unwilligness to save life at all costs, some preference for economics/convenience over human lives.
Let's try to quantify the economic loss. US GDP is ~$20 trillion. 3 months of that is ~$5 trillion. Assuming a drop of 25% in output from completely locking everyone down (Goldman predictions), that's ~$1.25 trillion. Add the current bailout package of $2 trillion, gives $3.25 trillion. Assume near-complete economic recovery after that, most businesses successfully reopen, for the rest of the year output only falls 5%. 5% * 15 trillion gives $0.75 trillion, for a total cost of $4 trillion.
With 2,200,000 lives lost, that works out to a cost per life saved of around $2 million. With that money, for 35,000 lives we could spend $70 billion. If we multiply that by e.g. 5, to get $350 billion, that seems like a reasonable number for building enough public transport infrastructure that cars were not needed, especially since it could be spread out over years (because we'd save 35,000 people every year, unlike corona where the saving of lives only happens in one year). Hence in this case the value of dollars per life is on a similar order of magnitude for both the private car bans and the mandatory lockdowns.
The above is a conservative approach: it would be more ideal to look at expected-life-years saved rather than just lives saved, and banning cars would do way better here because the majority of car fatalities are young people, whereas the majority of coronavirus fatalities only have a few expected years of life left.
Not that it matters, but the vast majority of the bailout package is loans.
>Do you drive a car? If so, by your logic you value your own convenience more than human lives, because driving kills over a million people and maims tens of millions more people every year.
Why did you shift your argument all of a sudden from comparing the number of human lives lost to putting a dollar value on human lives?
Your original argument was essentially asserting that the OP was placing too-low a monetary value on human lives. You accused him of valuing his own leisure more than human lives, but then implied it's okay to value economic factors more than lives if the lives lost are sufficiently small (you implied this by suggesting that preventing car accidents is much less important cos it saves fewer lives). You hence implied some ratio between human lives and convenience/the economy; I was exploring that ratio.
