Has there been any attempt to calculate the cost-benefit of all the various measures and how extreme we should go with them?
I’m guessing it’s hard to quantify and compare. A lot of things like general depression, isolation, kids missing half a year of school, etc. can’t really be evaluated against people dying. And on its surface it seems obvious: uh, people dying is much worse than any of those things.
But if I said that everything we did was to save one life, people probably would generally agree it wasn’t worth it (obviously so: people don’t seem too interested in preventing all kinds of deaths at all costs). What about ten lives? One thousand? Ten thousand? There’s some subjective level where it starts to feel obvious to more and more of us, until a majority of us agree.
But do we have any general sense what that number is? How do we decide how much to care? It might seem ghoulish to decide how many dollars is worth a life, but we do it every day.
With the data we have now, I imagine we can somewhat quantify this given enough sample jurisdictions with different rules? “Masking saves x lives per 1000.” “Closing schools saves y lives per 1000” etc. And perhaps then we’re able to decide “is x lives worth the qualitative harm done?” Probably. “What about y?” Maybe not.