Universities Fall 2020

[Merlin]

If this turns out to be not as lethal as they've been saying, people won't care, and won't heed the restrictions.  So far, this isn't even as deadly as a bad flu season.  There is something to be said for people getting back to work - suicide rates and "deaths of despair" will skyrocket if this goes on for much longer.  They will be higher than the Covid-19 deaths.

Well, the main reason the death rates have been as low as they are has been because of the effect of people isolating and flattening the curve. In places where that didn't happen, or didn't happen as quickly, we can see how the infection rates (and total deaths) are way higher.

The whole point of isolation is to keep the number of people needing critical care low enough not to overwhelm the hospitals (and medicine / PPE manufacturing capacity) until we can find a vaccine or treatment for the disease. If we stop isolating before those happen, we'll end up like Italy where people were dying because they couldn't get into the hospitals since they were all way above capacity.

Yeah, it's been less than two months and people are already losing their minds, and it is only going to get worse from here. So, I'm with you... we need to figure out a way to relax some of the restrictions without reversing them all together in order to get through this. It doesn't seem reasonable to assume that the number of suicides will exceed the number of unmitigated deaths from COVID-19, but I do agree that we need to address that as a people. Maybe start offering free crisis counseling or therapy for people while this is going on? I know there are a number of app-based therapy services now, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to work with them to make this happen.