[Goose]

And that's not to mention that if we do open things up again and loads of people start getting sick, people will voluntarily stay home even if not forced to, and the economy will still tank.  The only outcomes here are: 1) bad economy + relatively few lives loss or 2) bad economy + even more lives lost.  Anyone arguing otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.

I simply don't believe you really mean there are only two possible outcomes. The "outcome space" has lots of possibilities. Some of them trade off economic consequences against deaths. Characterizing these outcomes has to take into account that these are not linearly dependent on each other. Bad economic conditions can cause deaths, and deaths can cause bad economic conditions in non-linear ways. Avoiding health care system saturation is one such non-linearity. If you were correct, and there were only two possible outcomes, life would be easy. If we even really knew what the interactions of the two would be, it would be easier. Unfortunately, we don't even have a probability density function for these things, as this type of event hasn't happened in the USA for at least 100 years. Even then, the conditions were so different that it is dangerous to extrapolate to today, and it is a N of 1.

[Goose]

And that's not to mention that if we do open things up again and loads of people start getting sick, people will voluntarily stay home even if not forced to, and the economy will still tank.  The only outcomes here are: 1) bad economy + relatively few lives loss or 2) bad economy + even more lives lost.  Anyone arguing otherwise has no idea what they are talking about.

I simply don't believe you really mean there are only two possible outcomes. The "outcome space" has lots of possibilities. Some of them trade off economic consequences against deaths. Characterizing these outcomes has to take into account that these are not linearly dependent on each other. Bad economic conditions can cause deaths, and deaths can cause bad economic conditions in non-linear ways. Avoiding health care system saturation is one such non-linearity. If you were correct, and there were only two possible outcomes, life would be easy. If we even really knew what the interactions of the two would be, it would be easier. Unfortunately, we don't even have a probability density function for these things, as this type of event hasn't happened in the USA for at least 100 years. Even then, the conditions were so different that it is dangerous to extrapolate to today, and it is a N of 1.