...The health of the economy is not as important as the health of the citizenry. However, the two are interconnected. You can’t crush the economy without exacting a human toll. In a 2018 academic article, Taiwanese researchers Yu-Hui Lin and Wen-Yi Chen showed a link between unemployment and suicide, one that may linger for two to three years after the job market has improved. These findings suggest that even a short, sharp recession has lasting consequences. In rough terms, they postulate that each 1% rise in unemployment leads to one additional suicide per 100,000 people, and a rise in divorces of up to 1%. If unemployment jumps by 5% in the current shutdown of the U.S. economy, that would translate into some 16,500 additional suicides and up to 3 million divorces. The human toll is very real.
Robert Zoellick and others have noted that supply chain disruptions are jeopardizing the health and lives of patients facing much more serious health risks than coronavirus. There are 23 million Americans with cancer or who have had cancer, another 30 million with heart disease, 34 million with diabetes, and 35 million with chronic lung disease. Given the overlap between these groups, around 70-80 million Americans are being treated for one or more of these ailments. If one in a hundred of them die because they can’t get their medicine, or the hospitals can’t take them, there’s another 750,000 deaths.
...Why are we shuttering the global macroeconomy for a threat that temporarily doubles our risk of dying, and only for those of us who are infected? While a muscular national response is both expected and necessary, the old saying of "first do no harm" rates prominent consideration. In a noble effort to save lives, let's please be careful to not crush people’s careers, plans and dreams in the process.