During the current coronavirus lockdown, I’d pay good money to see just one public official be asked:
“How many lives are you willing to sacrifice to prevent one coronavirus death?”
Opponents of the lockdowns do themselves a disservice in focusing almost exclusively on the importance of “reopening the economy,” as if financial self-interest were the only reason to lift stay-at-home orders and risk an acceleration of COVID-19 spread and deaths.
“The devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may soon become irreversible,” she added.
Indeed, the lockdown itself poses significant health risks of its own, including countless deaths. The public has been bombarded with constantly changing models purporting to show the massive amount of coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths that will ensure should lockdown restrictions be lifted.
But where are the models projecting the deaths and suffering resulting from the lockdown itself? Why are our rulers so intent upon keeping those tradeoffs from entering the public debate over the lockdown?
The study further attributed roughly 45,000 suicides per year worldwide to the mental and psychological toll of unemployment.
The hope for many laid-off workers is that their unemployment will be temporary, but there remains great uncertainty about just how long this will last. The longer this economic shutdown and its consequences last, the more suicides there will be.
“But if you repeatedly feel anxious and stressed or it lasts a long time, your body never gets the signal to return to normal functioning. This can weaken your immune system, leaving you more vulnerable to viral infections and frequent illnesses. Also, your regular vaccines may not work as well if you have anxiety.”
Also accompanying the global economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus lockdowns will be mass starvation. Although the United States will suffer increased deaths from the economic hardships, the pain felt globally will be far more severe.
In Bangladesh, the article noted a survey that found that “Four in 10 respondents had three days’ worth of food at home or less.”
The mass hysteria and panic are also leading many people with serious health issues to dangerously avoid hospitals because of unwarranted fear of infection. Such avoidance can lead to serious and sometimes irreversible illnesses that were entirely preventable.
According to Richard Sullivan, a professor of cancer and global health at King’s College London and director of its Institute of Cancer Policy, “The number of deaths due to the disruption of cancer services is likely to outweigh the number of deaths from the coronavirus itself.”
The government’s response to the threat of the coronavirus has been unprecedented. The question of whether or not the response has been warranted has boiled down to saving lives versus “restarting” the economy. Many opponents of the near-universal lockdowns have been accused of wanting people to die just to save a few points in their Wall Street portfolios.
This is absurd.
The lockdown is costing lives. A lot of them. The economic fallout will cause more waves of deaths, especially among poorer nations. Preventable deaths and health problems are spiking, because scarce medical resources are being reserved for predicted waves of COVID-19 cases that largely aren’t materializing.
In a recent tweet, libertarian podcaster and comedian Dave Smith posed the question that needs to be asked but is thus far being ignored:
Sadly, it’s beginning to look more and more like our rulers don’t even want to publicly acknowledge these tradeoffs, or that they ever will.
Nothing in life is free; there are always tradeoffs. That includes the coronavirus lockdown. Saving “just one life” from the coronavirus is not costless. Unfortunately, the true nature of these costs is being ignored and reduced to mere temporary economic inconvenience.
As Woods concluded, “It isn’t just that we want to go out and get a haircut, as these geniuses keep saying. It’s that we’re against destruction.”