The consequences of additional COVID-19 deaths due to early re-opening have been pushed to the backburner by protests these last two weeks. Whereas political conservatives' push for economic recovery fuels illness and death, now progressives' need for sizable in-person rallies is generating added deaths. This flipping of the script provides an opportunity to pragmatically examine key questions.
The equi-death argument (as presented here in previous entries) discussed the attempt by early re-opening proponents to balance additional lives lost from re-opening with a tally of benefits from "getting back to work," such as reduced suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. This argument is logically flawed. It presumes an American economic structure so unyielding and crystalline that resources cannot be added or reallocated to ameliorate societal problems such as suicide, depression, drug use, and domestic violence.
More importantly, the equi-death argument is laced with self-contradicting elements. Lives can be sacrificed in service of getting the economy rolling so the vulnerable do not succumb to added suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. Yet the same need to save the vulnerable is deemed not applicable to everyday American life sans a pandemic. Suicides, depression, drug use (with the exception of alcohol), and incidents of domestic violence all clearly have a positive correlation with lower socioeconomic status. The early re-opening advocates see no reason to step in and reduce these problems during non-pandemic times. They are somehow driven by their inner angels, however, to step in during a pandemic at the cost of tens of thousands of additional COVID-19 deaths. Empathy and action are required only during the pandemic and only when, coincidentally, the economy is staggering. Adding income or health benefits to reduce suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence during "normal economic times" is considered unimportant.
Evidently, the mythology we are supposed to buy into is that the American economy in non-pandemic times is a model of perfection, doling out income and health care as it should be doled out. The structure is the message, so to speak. Long live the structure. But when the economy tanks because of a pandemic, for God's sake, let's save the poor from themselves by putting them back to work.
The equi-death argument, logically flawed, has a rather pungent whiff of convenience and hypocrisy.
Consequences of the Protests
The ongoing protests are going to lead to many more COVID-19 deaths. No amount of righteous indignation or being on the correct historical side is going to prevent that. The question is how many additional people will get seriously ill and how many additional lives will be lost due to viral spread during the demonstrations. My guess is that added deaths will be in the thousands, perhaps five digits.
In a way, progressives' risking their lives and the lives of those at home by protesting is the photographic/logical negative of the early re-openers' argument. Early re-opening proponents refuse to publicly acknowledge that massive budgeting changes could greatly reduce the suicide/depression/drug use/domestic violence issues, whether in pandemic times or not. The re-openers see the existing economic priorities as sclerotic. Progressives are faced with a diametrically opposite dynamic. Roughly a thousand Americans a year are killed by police. If the demonstrations wind up costing 10,000 lives or more due to COVID-19 spread, that's a decade's worth of police killings. Pandemic deaths are a raw, brutal metric that neither God nor Gandhi can change. The only way the protests turn out to be worth those additional COVID-19 lives lost is if long-term changes result. These changes would include not just police behavior, but health care access and outcomes and general socioeconomics. If long-term structural changes occur, then you can make the argument that lives saved going forward outweigh lives lost due to protests during a pandemic.
Conclusion
The early re-openers assume a crystalline, brittle American societal and economic structure. Conversely, the progressives' only way to counterbalance additional COVID-19 lives lost due to protests is to force actual structural change. If significant systemic changes do not result, the demonstrations will have sacrificed lives to the virus in service of people simply feeling good about having done the "right" thing.
Bob Dietz
June 10, 2020
