[user104658]

Originally Posted by Scarlett.

We don't really have a choice, just like we didn't back during the Spanish flu.

It's apples and oranges to be honest. In 1920 western economies were still largely industrial, and it was pre-globalisation, other than the fact that we were still at the tail end of Empire. The effects of a crash of this scale on an economy that leans heavily on City Trading and the service sector are completely unknown. I have a little voice in my head saying, in 100 years when History students are studying the 2020 pandemic, after talking about peak death figures it'll include the line "...and over the following decade the toll of the economic crash was far worse".

When people talk about limitless economic sacrifice "to save lives" they fail, repeatedly, to acknowledge the very simple and multiple-times-proven fact that when the economy declines, people die. We won't know for a long time if the lives saved by lockdown were outweighed by collateral deaths afterwards. It depends on the true extent of the global economic damage.

I get a little stuck on the morals of it all, too, and that's where I have to sadly be really blunt because people don't like to see it or think about it. If we've done all of this to save hundreds of thousands of mostly-elderly lives, and the cost is millions of starving children, then that is a complete and utter moral disaster.