For those of you arguing that we should balance projected coronavirus deaths against projected deaths consequent to an economic collapse, I actually agree. We should. But the latter are extremely hard to predict, and may be counterintuitive. Consider this:
We've been expecting emergency rooms in Paris to overflow, as they have elsewhere. But yesterday, I was stunned to see that the *total* number of admissions has in fact gone down so far: leparisien.fr/societe/corona…
Coronavirus admissions have soared. But all other admissions? Down. Why? I don't know. But some hypotheses:
First, everyone has been told, under no uncertain terms, not to go to the ER with frivolous complaints.
First, everyone has been told, under no uncertain terms, not to go to the ER with frivolous complaints.
Perhaps before this, people were using the ER as a walk-in clinic if they were too impatient to wait for a doctor's appointment. It may be that people *should* be going to the ER, but they're so scared of catching the virus that they're trying to bandage themselves up at home.
It may be that doctors who once quickly advised patients who called them with ambiguous symptoms to go to the ER--to be on the safe side--are now advising them to stay home--to be on the safe side. Or, my hypothesis, it may be that people on lockdown don't get into car accidents.
And they don't knife each other, sprain their ankle playing frisbee, or overdose, either. They don't seem to be trying to kill themselves at such high rates that we see an uptick in visits to the ER, so there's that.
No real idea how to interpret this--we need to look at the overall death rate, not the ER admission rate, to estimate how many people confinement itself is killing. And of course the effects will play out over months, even years.
But at first glance, this doesn't support the idea that "confinement will kill people, too."
Figuring out what a rational policy looks like under these circumstances is immensely difficult. No sane person argues, "confinement, forever." What's on the table is "confinement while we buy time and figure out what to do next. Probably for a few weeks."
