04-09-2020, 09:50 PM
(04-09-2020, 04:49 PM)ac3r Wrote: The federal government projects 11'000 to 22'000 deaths provided we can guarantee extreme physical distancing measures and more over the length of the pandemic. The best case scenario - which I figure implies even stricter lockdown measures - projects 4'400 deaths.
I think it's safe to say this "lockdown" will eventually become an actual lockdown, with essentially nothing remaining open but the essentials (grocers, pharmacists, gas stations, clinics, alcohol stores etc) lest we decide as a nation that we are okay with up to 22'000 people dying. It will be hard to balance the dilemma of life versus economics. If we have strict measures for too long, more people will become unemployed and businesses will bankrupt. If we relax things too early, we risk killing the immunocompromised, elderly, health care workers, front line workers and even perfectly healthy people who for some reason get sicker than expected.
To put this in context, 22'000 is slightly less than half of all Canadian military deaths in World War 1. This will probably be the biggest loss of Canadian life since then. If that doesn't make people stay inside, then I don't know what will - aside from police having the power to really punish people.
Sorry to be pedantic, but you mean World War II. In the first world war, Canada saw something over 60,000 deaths, and 150,000 wounded.
I really want to play devil's advocate, though, and say that 287,000 Canadians died last year, 2019. If the 22,000 deaths all occurred in the year 2020, this virus would be the third leading cause of death this year (the second leading cause, heart diseases, kills over 50,000). It might be unknowable how many, but at least some of those deaths would have occurred in the same period in the absence of the virus.
Those are just facts, not opinions. I have to say that I'm not entirely sure what the proper context to think about these things is.
We're in uncharted waters, so there is probably no saying with any kind of confidence by anyone what the real consequences of our actions will be. We've done serious damage to our economy and society so far, but the long-term consequences to mental health and emotional and material well being can only be guessed.
My personal opinion is that shutting down large swaths of society and the economy as we have seems prudent. But it seems to me that most people are taking their responsibility to curtail the spread of the virus by isolating themselves pretty seriously, and so I think enforcing these guidelines/orders with police is unnecessary and highly risky. Ultimately, I don't think it's even productive from the perspective of slowing the spread: people will do many things when told it's their duty, but when ordered to under threat of force will focus more of their energy on just not getting caught.
We all want to do what we can to help save lives. It is inevitable that people die, and that people will unfortunately die in this pandemic, though. If we opt to live in a police state (say) to try to minimize that loss of life, we may wind up doing harm to our society that will not be easily repaired once this pandemic is passed.