To those who portray the response to Covid as a binary choice between “staying inside for a few more weeks” and “killing grandma” the justification often comes down to “if we can save just one life…”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s the same form of emotion-driven logrolling that drives many peoples’ responses to a depressing list of issues, from gun control to welfare policy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And those approaches, being logrolling emotional manipulation as they are, almost never ask the same question from the other perspective. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that the most prescriptive of the “Lock It Down”-ers are people with public union jobs, or who can live on residuals<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They need to. Increased unemployment kills<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Opioids, alcholism, violent and property crime and suicide all spike, hard, when unemployment rises. Let’s look at the increase in deaths from opioids alone:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A\u00a02017 National Bureau of Economic Research paper<\/a>\u00a0finds a 3.6% increase in the opioid death rate per 100,000 people for a 1% rise in unemployment. There were\u00a014.6 opioid death rates per 100,000<\/a>\u00a0in the United States in 2018. If we use the more conservative estimate of a 20% unemployment rate without a quick return to lower levels, then there would be an estimated 59.4% rise in deaths per 100,000, leading to an increase of 8.7 deaths for a total of 23.3 for opioids.<\/p>