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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for stating what my mind couldn't quite put into words. I see lots of people with professional-class, WFH jobs being very sanctimonious about any suggestion that we should in any way take into account the financial impact when making the risk-reward decisions. Which, taken to its logical conclusion, would suggest that a worse-than-average flu season should also shut everything down, since tens of thousands of lives could be at stake. If this were somehow a pandemic which impacted the professional class more than the working class, I suspect we would see a very different moral calculus at work.

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Pretty soon many of those WFH pros in the big multinationals will also be furloughed or laid off. It hit mine because all forecasts show this will outlive June. Factories are closing, supply chains are drying up, and business to business sales have all buy stopped for a huge part of the economy. Given share prices also ranked, what do we all think is going to happen for all but the cash rich enterprises that can gobble everything up.

Totally agreed. I hate to repeat a phrase that's essentially a right wing / denialist talking point, but, at a certain point, the cure is definitely worse than the disease. You can see this pretty obviously if you imagine shutting down literally everything, so that GDP drops 100%. Clearly, people will die in that scenario.

So, the question really is: at what point is the cure worse than the disease? To answer that, you have to look at the impact of people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, not professionals who are WFH and largely insulated from it.

This is asking for a lot, but maybe this crisis will help Americans re-evaluate why we think it's such a good idea to set up society without a safety net, such that temporarily shutting down the economy for a few months is such a disaster. Can we make structural/political changes that reduce the impact of such shutdowns? I know this is expecting way too much outside-the-ideological-box thinking from politicians, but maybe this kind of thought will inch toward the mainstream.

That is probably asking a lot, but maybe we might get at the very least a re-evaluation of how we look at sick time for food and service industry workers. It's not just a job benefit, subject only to negotiation between employer and employee. It ought to be a public interest question, affecting lots of people other than employer and employee, so it ought to be handled more like social security or unemployment insurance. Even that is a stretch, but I could see it potentially happening.

I agree with the grandparent that we aren't worried enough about the large percentage of people that can't work at home but your statement that "would suggest that a worse-than-average flu season" is not backed by any science. There are 12-60k deaths a year from the flu according to the CDC (last year is in the 24-60k range). There are 37k deaths from COVID right now and the number is still increasing at non-linear rates. This is /on-top/ of the flu deaths. So this isn't just "a slightly worse flu season".

I don't mean to suggest that this won't be worse than the flu when all is done, but you're comparing global COVID-19 deaths to US-only flu deaths (US COVID deaths are about 3,000 right now, not 37,000).

I misread the data. I assumed it was global, but it was US only data I was looking at.

For the record global flu deaths some years are about 600k.

There is a good chance the lockdowns are saving more lives due to the normal flu then covid.

https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html

Poster above was not equating COVID to Influenza. They were making a point that at a certain point we have to weigh the tradeoffs of halting our economy versus saving X numbers of lives.

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