There is a legitimate debate of: Cause an Economic Depression vs X times the number of yearly deaths.
Note, the Economic Depression would indirectly cause deaths.
For example everyone agreed that not shutting down the global economic was the correct decision in regards to the Swine Flu pandemic which did cause 100,000 or more deaths.
What if it was 1 million projected deaths, 10 million or 50 million?
I honestly do not know the answer but there are individuals who specializes in these decisions.
> Also, an economic depression reduces air pollution which would reduce deaths.
In the immediate term, sure. In the medium term an economic depression would weaken investment, research & development in new green technologies which would increase deaths as the effects of climate change worsen.
Or, it could spur some necessity is the mother of invention innovation for deployment.
Or a million other things could happen.
I am asking that you change your “would” to “could” to properly reflect the uncertainty.
We have a tendency to want to convince people of our views, which gets in the way of making our views more correct. This is challenging to fight, but necessary to learn.
Because most people who don't advocate the POV are stopping at the zeroth order analysis, saying that you're a heartless killer if you want to consider any factors instead of just saving lives.
There is no model for any of this, on either side of the issue, and so the off-hand "we need to get back to dating, etc." really does look... heartless. It's just as much a zeroeth-order analysis as the other.
Fixing that would mean giving due consideration to the complexity of the situation, at least attempting to define one's assumptions/model, and being explicit about how much loss of life one is willing to accept.
With inadequate measures, this pandemic could rival the Holocaust in number of deaths. There's absolutely a difference between allowing millions to be killed rather than committing mass murder or genocide, but "let's get back to life as usual" does demand justification.
Hopefully we'll discover the tradeoff is less severe than that, but if not it's going to have to be. I don't think you realize just how unhappy people are with being locked down; it's very likely we would see violent rebellions against an attempt to impose a second one.
Sorry, no, I may have been unclear. I don't know that my estimate is biased - I believe I've properly adjusted for my other beliefs and desires - but I can't know for sure I adjusted correctly so it would be misleading for me to present an estimate as though I'm a dispassionate observer.
Our best guesses are the best we can do. Are you familiar with the research around the bias bias? Or the fact that smart people tend to be more subject to biases?
Are millions of people dying an acceptable trade-off for us to be able to date?