How Many Lives Will Politicians Sacrifice in the Name of Fighting COVID-19?

Mises Institute

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?”

Thomas Sowell has repeatedly written that in a world of scarcity there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. The lockdown debate has thus far focused on that tradeoff as one between saving lives versus a temporary blip in the economy.

As Tom Woods wrote recently, “We heard it from Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, and plenty of people since then: if we save even one life with all these draconian measures, it will have been worthwhile.”

But there’s so much more to it than that. The lockdown itself is costing lives, perhaps more so than the virus itself.

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.

As Heather Mac Donald wrote in this recent American Greatness piece, “The focus on saving ‘just one life’ from the coronavirus, as Cuomo put it in March, to the exclusion of all other considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking.”

“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?

Research has clearly shown a positive correlation between increased unemployment and suicide rates. A study published by The Lancet found that “the relative risk of suicide associated with unemployment was elevated by about 20–30%” in their study period.

The study further attributed roughly forty-five thousand 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.

Loss of life from substance abuse will also increase. As the substance abuse rehab clinic Recovery Ways notes, “One study from 2017 found that every time unemployment rises by one percentage point in a given county, the rate of opioid deaths increases by 3.6 percent and the rate of emergency room visits increases by seven percent.”

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Source: Bradley Thomas | Mises Institute

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