Are We Crashing Our Economy for a Fear Out of Proportion to Reality?

Hospital mistakes kill 250,000 people every year, yet we still go to hospitals. Car crashes kill another 40,000, but we keep driving. Heart disease kills 650,000, but we rarely exercise. Are we crashing our economy for a fear out of proportion to reality? —Julie D.

Under normal circumstances, Julie, I'd applaud your instinct for culling the herd. Unfortunately, your question is basically the same "flu kills people every year" argument that Donald Trump was pimping last month (to be fair, he's walked it back since then).

This canard holds that people die all the time, so if COVID-19 kills a few more than usual, who cares? Life will go on. (Well, not for the people who died, but you get the idea.) Unfortunately, there are several reasons you can't write off this pandemic as "The Flu but a Little Worse."

Let's run the numbers. Greater Portland holds about 2.7 million people. The U.S. annual mortality rate is (or used to be, anyway) around 0.8 percent, meaning that locally we bury about 21,500 people a year, or around 425 per week.

Meanwhile, La Rona has a fatality rate of around 2 percent. An unchecked outbreak (one in which 80 percent of us get the disease) would add another 43,000 to that number, effectively tripling our annual body count.

Only triple? Well, that's not so bad—we could get used to an extra 850 stiffs a week, right? Unfortunately, due to the nature of outbreaks, it's not 850 a week for 52 weeks; it's more like 15,000 a week for three weeks.

But wait, there's more! Now that we've completely overwhelmed the health care system, the virus's 2 percent fatality rate will go up, because of all the people who would have lived if they'd gotten medical care but will now die because they didn't.

Scale this laissez-faire approach to pestilence up to the national level and the pandemic goes from killing 500,000 people to killing 6.5 million.

I understand the temptation to say the hell with it and save the economy. Still, it's a tough call. If only there were some precedent of a nation consigning 6 million of its citizens to a grisly death in the name of progress so we could have a clue as to how history might judge us.