As an example, 9 million people die each year due to hunger or hunger-related issues, many of them children. 135 million face food insecurity. Due to lockdowns and recession, the World Food Program estimates the toll will double this year. And hunger is just one cause of death that a recession can lead to (suicides, substance abuse, etc).
Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.
> Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives.
That's a real issue in the developing world; in the developed world the resources exist to buffer the temporary additional low-end economic impact; not doing so effectively is a policy choice (and, in practice, a deliberate active one made when the alternative of providing the aid is presented), not an inherent corollary of lockdowns.
> That's a real issue in the developing world; in the developed world the resources exist to buffer the temporary additional low-end economic impact
That seems like a pretty sterile way to describe it.
Right now, in the (presumably) developed US, 1 in 5 children don't have enough food, 3x the amount during 2008. That's a result of years of policy choices, but one particularly policy choice caused it to spike. If there's a resource buffer, it's not buffering.
> Right now, in the (presumably) developed US, 1 in 5 children don't have enough food, 3x the amount during 2008. That's a result of years of policy choices, but one particularly policy choice caused it to spike.
Yes, the policy choice not provide the kind of mass aid (whether directly to citizens or through firms in a way which reasons the mass of the citizenry to protect empmoyment and pay) to the population that pretty much every other industrialized country facing this crisis has, even the ones (like Sweden) without mandatory lockdowns.
The US federal response to COVID-19, both in narrow public health measures and broader, including economic policy, measures (and structurally much of this has to be done at the federal level because of the way state and federal financing works) has been nothing short of mass murder by depraved indifference.
> Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.
The choice between "saving people" vs "economy" is a false choice. Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run. People that live in fear of the virus will not consume, and lockdowns reduce the amount of time that the virus is out there.
You can force people to go back to work, but you can't force people to consume.
> Lockdowns might help the economy more in the long run.
It might. We're not really sure. Either way, I think OP has a good point. It is not entirely impossible that we do the lockdown, still same number of people die and we also grind economic activity to a halt leading to other kinds of shortages. If this is what will happen, then the lockdown is a would be a bad choice. Sweden actually is banking on this. They might be wrong, but it's not an entirely crazy stance, there is a reasoning behind it.
Here in the Midwest, everything except 1) franchise stores and 2) single-proprietor stores have gone to curbside pickup. They invented a whole pickup process at our grocery store, with shipping containers in the parking lot containing staged carts with numbers, masked-and-gloved young people filling and shuttling carts to the container. They text you when your cart is ready. Drive over and park in a numbered space and reply with your space number. Somebody comes out of the container with your cart and you pop your trunk.
Cars coming and going all day. Works well for everybody (with a car).
I'm sure Ticketmaster knows this is illegal. They probably weighed their options and saw:
1) refund every ticket as required and run out of money immediately
2) do whatever they can to have some operating capital, and maybe continue existing until summer 2021-ish when live music is once again legal, then deal with a lawsuit in a time when courts are once again operating
I loathe Ticketmaster, so #1 seems fine to me, but I get their decision as a business. Honestly even #2 seems like a hail mary.
You gotta get on at midnight, order two weeks out, and get a weekly pipeline going. I used this method to get a bag of flour the other day, it was amazing.
Like everyone else, I'm indoors with just my family, ordering food/groceries, wiping everything down, wearing masks/gloves if we ever have to go out, explaining to my toddler why he can't play with friends, etc, etc. For the last month, and probably the next two or three.
What else do you want from me? Do I really have to spend every moment watching the slow train wreck from every angle? COVID is covered literally everywhere, you can't not see it.
The good is just maybe not falling into total depression, alcoholism, or worse.
I really don't want anyone to have the impression that this team tried to take shortcuts
- man who let his team take shortcuts
NASA is still thinking whether to allow Boeing to proceed with its first manned flight to prevent delays or to require the company to successfully complete an unmanned flight first.
Yeah, it's probably fine now. I mean, ugh, look at all these passing tests!
It's staggering to me that Boeing is confident enough to not want another unmanned fight. After all this, you really want to roll the dice again?
Lockdowns might save lives, and I can't blame public health officials for protecting their community, but I personally fear more lives will be lost due to economic costs. They just might be poorer, quieter lives. And while death is, of course, final, suffering in life should count for something too.
https://www.wfp.org/news/covid-19-will-double-number-people-...