I totally understand what you are saying, but I am not gonna risk my wife, my kids or my grandkids to prove a point.
Another way to analyze a problem when the
evidence doesn't lend itself to a trivial decision, is to instead flip it around and analyze the costs of being wrong.
If I put a round in a six shot revolver and spin the cylinder and put it to my head, there is only a 16.666% chance I'll blow my brains out.
I'll spend a dollar on a lotto ticket that has a 16% chance of winning all day long! But I won't play Russian Roulette with the same odds because the cost of being wrong is so much higher.
Estimates from epidemiological modelers at the CDC projected possible deaths from COVID-19 of 2.2 million Americans (Assuming no mitigating interventions).
Various people on the internet claim this quarantine will throw us in to a vast, civilization crushing depression. I've not seen them provide evidence. As far as I know there is not a technical definition of a depression, unlike a recession. (Well, the colloquial definition is that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours.
)
Generally I would define a depression as a serious recession that probably lasts 3-4 years. I don't not believe that this will last that long. If we get a vaccine in 12-18 months or therapeutics even sooner that reduce the risk of this thing to the level of an appendicitis, then I think the recovery will be quite swift. There is no structural damage. We are not rebuilding factories razed to the ground after a war.
Even if it was a depression, in my opinion, that does not equate to millions of Americans dead. Depression in America have been painful and life disrupting for sure. But I have never seen
evidence it has lead to mass casualties.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-depression-had-little-effect-on-death-rates-46713514/So when push comes to shove, I would tilt the decision balance toward accepting economic damage we can repair, against loss of human lives that will be gone forever. At least at the levels that not having quarantined would have probably led to.
I'm not saying it has to be maintained forever. I've outlined, in a previous post, a set of perfectly reasonable exit criteria that I think would allow us to relax quarantine responsibly. But we needed this emergency intervention to catch our balance. And eventually the critical rate will climb back up to threaten overloading our health system and we'll have to do it again. Probably in the Fall sometime.
