Originally Posted by
gugie
The point is which is worse, doing nothing and letting several hundred thousand people in the US alone die and quickly get through the economic recovery, or stretch out the economic dread and limit the number of people dead? It may be that the number of people dying prematurely from economic collapse is as many or greater than the first option.
Originally Posted by
Clyde1820
But it's a bit of a "tossing the baby out with the bath water" thing, to shut down the world's economy.
An example would be: Singapore, and its highly-specific, targeted approach. Of course, they didn't dally around, early on, once it was clear there was a highly-transmissible pathogen in the region. (And Singapore being what it is, it's also a travel hub.) As of today, Singapore's had 313 cases, 114 have recovered, and there have been zero deaths. And they haven't shut down their economy. By comparison, the USA has gone "ape" and refused an early, targeted approach that has attempted to identify every person arriving who might have symptoms, and seeks to identify and quarantine localized sub-groups of the population who've been in contact with those infected.
Singapore:
0.0055% (313) of the population of 5.7M have been infected, with 0 deaths.
USA:
0.0029% (9415) of the population of 329M have been infected, with 150 deaths.
Only one example, and a population of 5.7M with only so many transit hubs isn't 329M with countless "international" ports, but still. A highly-aggressive, targeted approach versus, for lack of a better term, a very late, "
throw the baby out with the bathwater" method. Even without forcible shutdown of whole swaths of industry and small businesses, Singapore's estimating some areas of economic activity might well drop 30% or more this year, and take months longer than the last SARS(-1) outbreak took. Hard to imagine it wouldn't be vastly worse with the U.S.'s approach.