COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Infoman said

Yeah, I'm not (and never have) suggested there will not be a trade off... nor do I have a magic number of what that should be... there is a risk trade off with every life activity...

I also also NEVER said anything resembling that we should in any way "open up the economy with no restrictions".... that's every bit as a disastrous suggestion as the "lock down until there is a vaccine" crowd...

I said there needs to a balance... and that balance needs to start being employed on a case by case basis with common sense measures where they apply... before we reach a social tipping point.

Details obviously vary.... but the status quo can't remain much longer.

Click to expand...

I get that, and I didn't mean to accuse you of trying to just open things up without restrictions and damn the consequences. I was just trying to illustrate a potential way of determining what actions should be taken.

My concern is that people are reacting emotionally out of a very justified sense of fear (over economic uncertainty, loss of freedom of movement, etc), and we aren't going to take the time to weigh the trade-offs in as an analytic manner as possible.

I tend to be risk averse, and I heavily weigh in favor of mitigating low probability but high severity events. So, if I have say a known cost of a few trillion dollars but weighed against an unknown in terms of number of lives lost, long term health issues and resulting economic damage - I'm more inclined to go with the known cost as long as I believe there is a decent chance that the unknown cost will exceed the known costs. I can plan and mitigate for one, whereas the other one I have to react to, and people panic when things happen without proper planning.