Suicide jumps drastically with unemployment, and the poor will be disproportionately affected. Some estimate that death from despair could exceed that of the virus.
Media has been inundated with Hollywood celebs encouraging us all to #StayAtHome, and Youtube celebs pop up during every single Youtube ad, telling us that we should stay home, that this will save lives. And yet how will this accomplish anything?
Estimates of the potential fatalities increased multiple times, and have now decreased multiple times. Media would push their agenda that this is due to the measures we have taken, but consider how ineffectual these really are. Grocery stores, department stores, and restaurants are still open; every surface is not cleaned between customers, workers are still showing up and working in close proximity, most without masks, and those few that do use a simple cloth mask that is ineffective at preventing virus transmission. Federal, state and local governments are still operating under more or less normal conditions. Multiple states remain entirely open, with effectively no change to day-to-day activities.
Despite that, the numbers are still being revised down. Why?
This disease is supposed to be more infections than the flu, a long asymptomatic period, multiple day survival on surfaces, so anything short of an absolute lockdown on all society with massive cleaning efforts would leave vectors of transmission. And while not everyone is at risk of transmitting, all it would take is a series of tragic coincidences to continue the wildfire spread.
This hasn’t happened, and in fact, some data for Oregon and New York show the curve has already flattened and it had nothing to do with Shelter-in-Place.
So while quarantine measures continue with no end date, small business is ruined, unemployment skyrockets, people are forced to stay home, denied human-to-human social interaction that we all need, some more than others, and the cost of this quarantine is not addressed, it is mocked, derided, called a “Necessary Cost”, without even addressing what that cost is.
While studies show that loss of life from suicide could be as much as 60,000 people in the US for every 1% increase in Unemployment over a period of 5 years. And it takes years for the economy to rebuild, as anyone can well remember happened from the Great Recession of 2008.
