In recent weeks, I've learned not to post anything on
Facebook, because people decide I'm a hater if I so much as suggest that there might be another metric worth considering besides the coronavirus mortality rate. So I won't open that can of worms here, except to say that risk management entails looking at a variety of factors, not exclusively public health.
The strength of the economy, the stability of society, the prevalence of psychological illness, and the death tolls of other diseases - all these are relevant factors to take into account. A purely epidemiological approach is necessarily narrow-minded. It doesn't do us much good to save, say, one thousand lives from COVID-19 if we've condemned our nation to a decade or more of grinding poverty.
Chronic unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosure, the loss of businesses and the lifetime of effort they represent ... these are not trivial outcomes. And they do have public health consequences. Look at the epidemic of opioid addiction among the chronically unemployed in the Rust Belt.
This too shall pass, though it may leave a Great Depression in its wake. (And those who believe that economic numbers are "only statistics," as I've been told very heatedly online, will soon learn how real these statistics can be.)
What interests me, in the context of this blog, is that
vast numbers of people in the Western world seem absolutely flabbergasted to discover that they are, in fact, mortal. The reality of their own demise evidently had never been quite clear real to them before, and now fills them with existential dread.
Comment: See also: