I want to start by saying that I am not a doctor. I am not a nurse or a scientist or an economist or even a journalist or politician. I am a freelance writer and editor who, like so many others out there I’m sure, has spent the past week at home on the couch reading literally hundreds of articles on every aspect of this virulent disease and its impact. It’s almost an understatement to say it has consumed me. I have read scientific reports, economic reports, and opinion pieces by the truckload. I have searched desperately for any new information from any source possible. I have read articles from every spectrum of both political leaning and reliability — AP, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, NPR, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, MSNBC, and yes, even HuffPost and Buzzfeed and Brietbart. I have jokingly taken a quiz to learn how long our current stock of toilet paper will last (36 days). I have read local news columns from around the world to figure out what things are really like not where I am (currently on lockdown in South Africa), and I have voraciously consumed corona-related memes as they seem to be a beacon of hilarity in an otherwise darkening planet. Did you hear about the plague of billions of locusts in East Africa? Yeah. So that’s happening too.

Through my scouring of the internet, I have learned many things. I have learned what many others have — how the virus works, how it spreads, and how it is different from other similar viruses. I have learned some things many others probably haven’t, such as what R0 means and what ground glass opacities in the lungs are. I have learned what is like to have more critical reactions to the disease where your lungs fill with liquid and you are literally drowning in your own blood and secretions. I have watched the President of my beloved country tell all of us that very soon, cases would be very, very close to zero while the President of another country, South Korea, mobilized his people and contained the virus within weeks, despite having their first cases appear on the same day. Most pointedly through all this, I have attempted to understand the delicate and vicious balance of economic collapse against the value of human life.

I am writing this piece today because I have nowhere else to put my ever-rising frustrations. I cried today. I yelled today. I wrote several furious Facebook posts directed at my uncle who firmly believes the Democrats are intentionally tanking the economy in order to get Trump out of office. This, apparently, is a real opinion people have.

The purpose of this piece, while partially to distill my own grievances as I wander from corner to corner of my quarantined house, is to truly compile and investigate everything we know about where this is going and what we need to do about it. It is to examine the arguments being made by some, including our President, that the likely economic fallout isn’t worth the number of lives being potentially saved. Though I guess most of all it is a plea to help those who don’t have time for the political games that are being dragged out in Washington and dished out through partisan news sources. Time is literally running out to save America.

How Bad Is It?

The most draconian estimates of the virus had it killing 2.2 million Americans if we hadn’t done anything. But we did, so that tends to drop down to around 1 million with “some” social distancing. Further still if we #staythefuckhome. Just for a super fun comparison, around 407,000 Americans died fighting in World War II. More starkly, just 2,977 Americans died on 9/11, and we have spent more than $6.4 trillion fighting that invisible monster. Each year the leading cause of death in America is heart disease, which killed 647,457 people in 2017 and accounted for 23.5% of all deaths. When I think about even 50,000 Americans dying (here is a calculator that lets you adjust infection and mortality rates for SARS-CoV-2), I think about who those Americans are. I think about how I sobbed on 9/11 and how I sobbed on that day for years after when I watched tribute videos and thought about each of those lives. Eventually, one year, I stopped crying. But if 3,000 American lives can bring a person to tears — and a nation to war — for years, how can we so blithely talk about “only 50,000?”

We know that the seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of Americans each year, and hospitalizes hundreds of thousands. OK. So this isn’t that big a deal? Just a flu that’s a little worse. Of course, that’s ridiculous for several reasons. First of all, hospitals in our healthcare system run regularly run at around 65% capacity, and some at over 80%. And that capacity includes the hundreds of thousands who are hospitalized for the flu along with all the strokes and stabbings and accidents and births that have not decided to stop happening since coronavirus came around. So yes, the flu kills a lot of older and immunocompromised people, but we are able to save many of them because we can give them care. Mortality rates vary, but it’s currently estimated that around 1.4% of those who get COVID-19 will die (much better than the original 3.8% estimates). The mortality rate of the seasonal flu, by comparison, is typically around 0.1% in the US. Most of those who die will be older and have underlying conditions, but not all of them.

If we assume the most conservative estimate I have found about the number of people who will become infected (1% versus many other estimates ranging in the 25–70% range) that’s an additional 3.27 million infections in the U.S (note that each year between 9 million and 45 million people get the flu, so 3.27 million is likely a vast underestimate) and 20% of those who contract COVID-19 will need hospitalization. So that’s an additional 650,000 people — all needing the same specialized type of care — within a period of a couple months, if not weeks, based on how quickly it spreads through individual cities. How many people are hospitalized annually for the flu? 300,000. And again, that’s over the entire year. So no, a minimum of 650,000 additional bodies who are highly contagious in a system that only has 924,000 beds to begin with is not “no big deal.” Please note this is all back-of-the-napkin math, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s only to prove a point. Even in the most conservative scenario, our healthcare system can’t handle coronavirus. And when we can’t handle it, people die who could have been saved. People die from other causes who could have been saved because there simply weren’t enough beds and they were told to go home. Does it matter whether that number is 10,000 or 100,000? What value are we putting on these lives?

As I’ve read some other arguments go (made by our own President), car crashes kill 40,000 people per year, but you don’t see us banning driving. This, of course, is a straw man fallacy. We have done everything in our power as a nation to reduce car-related fatalities and it has been a massive success since we started in the 1960s. And car crash fatalities aren’t growing at an exponential rate. 599,108 people died of cancer in the U.S. in 2017…we don’t shrug that off as something there is nothing to be done about. No, we pour billions of dollars into research to stop it from happening. We don’t “let” 50,000 people die from the flu each year: we try to save them. If coronavirus is 10 times more deadly than the flu, and the infection rate was the same (it’s not, it’s higher) that would already be a half a million American deaths, the third-leading cause based on historical averages. Historically speaking, as a nation, we spend trillions of dollars every year to stop people from dying in all the different ways that they die. The only difference is that the solution to this is stopping the economy and not hiring more doctors or designing new drugs (both of which stimulate the economy). That being said, our government also lets tens of thousands of people die every year just because they can’t afford their own insurance…so there’s that.

Only the Good Die Young

Another thing that is happening, which is particularly disturbing, is the frank discussion of the fact that this only really affects old people with underlying conditions who were “dying anyway.” Sure, someone who is 75 isn’t likely to have more years on the planet than someone who is 30. But a 70-year-old man has only a 3.6% chance of dying in the following year and a 44% chance of making it to 90, depending on which study you read. Life expectancy statistics are based on entire populations — they include the deaths of infants and children — they aren’t a true barometer of how long you can expect to live once you get up there. Most ironically, the old white men arguing that this disease only kills old people are five times as likely to be hospitalized for it — including our current president and the two other guys trying to take his job.

We cannot, as a country, value one life more than another. And yes, they have had to make those choices in Italy. And no, it is not because they have shitty socialized medicine. They have more beds per capita than we do. It’s because they ran out of the equipment and the space needed to save lives. So choices were made. Devastating, heartbreaking choices made by exhausted, overworked doctors. We are about to start having to make those choices.

As I started to read articles on the Federalist and other hyper-conservative sites, however, I started to question these numbers myself. What if they’re right? What if the mortality rates are far lower than we think (because most carriers are actually asymptomatic) and the question is a few thousand people ultimately dying versus a hundred million losing their jobs, losing their savings, filing for bankruptcy? Is that an ethical math I was willing to do? And honestly, I tried. How many more people would die from being homeless without healthcare? The President yesterday argued that even more would die from suicides during a depression. I tried to do some very large trolley problems in my head to see if there was a way to keep the economy going and businesses open without risking too many lives. And while a part of me does see that perspective, it’s based on a lot of assumptions: that this is not that bad, that the mortality rate stays low in a country where a third of population is diabetic or pre-diabetic (among other things), and that we have enough treatment to stop the mortality rate from skyrocketing due to lack of available care. Those just aren’t assumptions we should be willing to make about a highly infectious disease we know relatively little about. Most importantly: we can stop this broader economic fallout from happening (more on that later).

Thinning the Herd

My crazy uncle suggested we just quarantine the elderly (he is over 60, by the way) and let everyone else get the virus to build up herd immunity (side note: we are not sure yet if getting the virus makes you immune to future infection). Most of us would be fine after a “bad cold” and it couldn’t spread anymore. Not as much economic fallout as restaurants stay open and younger people keep going to work and enjoying their lives. But what exactly does keeping all the old people home look like? Are we rounding them up in detention centers? Are we putting military guards outside their apartments? Are we IDing people entering bars to make sure they’re under 60? Sure, that might work in China, or here in South Africa, but we Americans love our freedoms. So old people, please stay home, maybe you’ll die, but the economy will be better off. The problem (other than all the obvious ones), is that old people are not staying home. They don’t care, and if you’re a Republican person, according to numerous polls, you care even less. So then you’re back out in the world getting infected, and we’re back where we started. OK, Uncle Peter. So much for the herd immunity solution.

One of the scariest things about this virus is that it spreads through asymptomatic individuals, many of whom never show symptoms and never even think about whom they may have infected. You can have a bit of a runny nose, assume it’s allergies, and get on the subway, get on a plane, anything. Some studies estimate up to 31% of those infected could be asymptomatic. This could drive down the total mortality rate, which is good, but it raises the chances of it spreading more easily without extreme social distancing measures. One of the reasons SARS was contained so quickly is because people were most contagious when they were the most ill. Bill Gates eerily warned of this precise type of pandemic in a TED Talk in 2015 because its invisible nature is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Generation Z is partying on the beaches of Florida shrugging off infections that “won’t hurt them” while flying back to their hometowns and infecting — and potentially killing — their own grandparents. Sorry, that was harsh, but seriously, “aspiring Soundcloud rapper?” #staythefuckhome.

The Value of a Life

So we have to contain it, to some degree. OK, we’re doing that. But Donald Trump is already arguing to end social distancing early to curb the economic fallout. If we’re talking about losses in the stock market, I’d like to remind everyone reading that 45% of Americans own no stock at all — not even in retirement funds — and 84% of all stocks are owned by 10% of the country’s wealthiest. So half the country doesn’t care one way or another that your portfolio just took a 30% haircut so long as they can eat. And another big chunk of the population maybe has 1–2% of their entire net worth tied up in stocks. As long as the actual, physical businesses stay in business, the stock market will rebound when people go back to work.

But Trump and many other conservatives are calling to push the number of dead people higher so that the government doesn’t have to pay to keep people in their homes and businesses. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick even proposed old people “sacrifice themselves” to save the economy for their grandchildren. Seriously? Is this really fucking happening?

Statistically speaking, whenever the U.S. government has to make a policy decision — such as whether to raise a speed limit or lay a new pipeline — they have to calculate the economic cost of that. And that cost includes a human life analysis. If a new highway safety project costs $10 billion but will only save a hundred lives, is that worth it? As of 2006, the EPA calculated the statistical value of a human life (VSL) at $7.4 million, and the Department of Transportation at $9.1 million in 2016. This number doesn’t represent the numeric value of a life, but rather, how much people would be willing to spend to save one. So, if we go on the highest estimates of death of 2.2 million Americans, my calculator says those lives are worth spending a total of 2×10^13, or $20,000,000,000,000. ($20 trillion). That is about equal to our entire GDP. If we think only 10,000 people will die and they’re worth only $7.4 million each, that’s $74,000,000,000 ($74 billion). Well in that case, based on the way our government works, we should definitely just let them die rather than spend a few trillion. Just for a fun comparison, we’ve currently spent over $2 billion PER PERSON who was killed in 9/11.

The point here is that all of those numbers are absurd, and money isn’t even real. The real losses to our economy won’t be from injecting trillions of taxpayer dollars back into it — the losses will come if we dont.

Now let’s talk about the actual economic fallout.

The Cost of Quarantine

In an average week, we see about 220,000 jobless claims in the US. This is during Trump’s economic boom that started during the Obama administration and saw unemployment at 3.5% before this whole shitstorm hit. OK cool. Then we get about a week into this crisis and it’s like, “Oh snap, 281,000 jobless claims. That’s quite a jump!” Then Trump tells states to not even release their actual unemployment requests because who needs to be bogged down with details at a time like this? And then, in almost a single moment, the entire retail and restaurant industries came to a dead stop. One in five Americans were told to stay home. It’s now up to one-in-three. The first estimates from Goldman Sachs for jobless claims for the week ending March 21 are 2.25 million. For reference, the highest ever in history was 700,000. So this is at least three times worse than it’s ever been. It is estimated that up to 30% of the entire country will be unemployed during the worst of this. 30% of our country is 98 million people. Ok, cool, cool, cool, so what are we gonna do about it?

Rich Country, Poor People

The scariest part of this (outside of the fact that we are living in a horror movie), is that the economy isn’t slowing over time — it has come to a screeching, rubber-burning halt. No one who didn’t work in an office, at a grocery store, in a hospital, or driving a truck is working. Musicians aren’t working. Wedding planners aren’t working. Computer repair people and nail technicians aren’t working. It’s fucking everyone. This is bad on its own, but the effects will continue to ripple and multiply.

66% of our GDP comes from consumer spending, i.e. when you go out and buy anything anywhere. In 2019 the U.S. GDP was $21,427,000 million. Read it again…it’s $21.4 million million…that’s $21.4 trillion. 66% of that is $14 trillion dollars. And this $14 trillion comes into being when I get paid and go have a beer at the bar. But now I’m unemployed, so I don’t have money for a beer, and the bar is closed, so they can’t get money for selling a beer even if I did have money, and yet both of us have to pay rent to people who need our money to be able to make their mortgage payments to the bank and so that they can buy beers and stuff. And we can’t just ask the bank to forgive mortgages for a minute because those are all wrapped up in complicated debt instruments that rely on the interest payments to pay their investors. I mean, we could, but the banks or the government would have to shoulder that. Funny how it all comes back to the markets, right?

So the best way to hold the economy in place until we can all leave our houses again is to give people the money they need to pay their landlords, buy their groceries, and keep buying the other things we are allowed to buy during this insane time. Like puzzles, or subscriptions to Disney+, or cases of wine. Some people are doing OK, and they don’t need free money. People are working from home, their businesses are running well enough remotely (myself included), and they haven’t lost half (or all) of their household income. But most of the people who did lose their income (retail workers, bartenders, fast food workers) are already the most vulnerable section of our society. They easily make up the majority of the 50% who don’t own any stocks and don’t have any savings. In fact, 40% of this country couldn’t afford a $400 emergency expense without putting it on a credit card or asking their family. 12% couldn’t afford one by any means. According to a 2015 study by Pew Research, 38% of Americans are “rent-burdened” (spending more than 30% of their income on rent) and 17% of Americans spend more than 50%, which is a number that has been steadily on the rise since 2001. Don’t even get me started on the fact that 27 million Americans are completely uninsured during a global pandemic (that number was 46.5 million before Obamacare), and there is another vast swath who are technically insured but who sure as shit aren’t going to a hospital when they have a $6,000 deductible and just lost their job for the foreseeable future.

How to Save the Economy

So we have to consider here: what is the best way to keep the entire engine running? Currently our government is floating the idea of $1,200 checks to American families, capping off at those who make over $99,000 and decreasing if you make less than $75,000 (explain to me how that part makes sense?). This is sort of the right idea, but one of the problems with this is that the average monthly rent in the United States is $1,600 and it’s due in a week. The checks will also be going to people who don’t need them (like me) who only aren’t spending because everything is closed. So people will get part of their rent paid and then sit around hungry waiting for the next government check because let me remind you: THERE IS NO WORK. Other people will get checks and spend the same as they are now because all they can buy is groceries, which doesn’t help anything. Luckily, there are some smart people out there who came up with a better idea. In both Denmark and the UK, they have passed legislation guaranteeing people 75–80% of their income up to a certain amount if they have been affected by the virus. In the UK it is $2,900 per month, in Denmark, it is $3,418. The catch is that their employer has to keep them employed and hire them back as soon as business goes back to normal. While these plans have issues, (they don’t cover the self-employed and other freelancers), it’s a damn good start.

The fascinating thing about this kind of recession is that it’s in theory a V-shape: Things fall sharply, and then when they rebound, economies grow at a rapid pace for a short while as people book more trips, go out to eat more, and enjoy all the shopping they couldn’t do. When 10–90 million Americans are suddenly unemployed, they go out and look for jobs — any jobs — while they wait for this to blow over. Then, when things do start to reopen, the places they used to work have to find new people to hire, and train them, and it slows the pace at which the economy can snap back. Even worse, the places they used to work may have closed down entirely because, shocker, most businesses cannot afford to make rent and pay utilities and pay their debts when they have zero coming in for a week, much less for a month. So if we want to save our economy from a depression that lasts years, we need to keep small business owners in their businesses, we need to cover all rent and mortgage and utility payments to keep people in their houses, and we need to keep people in their jobs as much as possible until all this blows over. That is it.

The Cost of Inaction

So how much would a program like this cost? It’s hard to pin down. Certainly a few trillion in an economy of our size. As I said, I’m not an economist. But what I can assure you of is that the economic cost of NOT stopping evictions, waiving debt payments, and spending ANY AMOUNT NECESSARY to keep people in their homes and jobs is going to be far, far greater than the few trillion it will take to keep everyone afloat until this is over. It may only be worth spending $7,900,000 to save a life, but this money will be saving generations from cyclical poverty. If Donald Trump wants to talk about the loss of life due to suicide, he’s gonna make it way worse when tens of millions of people lose their homes and have no jobs to go back to. He says that shit as if we don’t have the power to stop it from happening.

We don’t have to do the UK thing and pay people 80% of their salaries (though I honestly think it’s brilliant). But we DO need evictions halted NOW. We need a moratorium on all mortgage payments for both federal and private loans and a freezing of rental payments either until financial assistance arrives or until the country reopens. Giving people a break on their rent and mortgage payments is great, but forcing them to pay it back as soon as the cogs start turning again is worthless. If someone spends 40% of their income on rent, how long will it take them to pay an additional three months of rent? They were already choosing between which of their other bills to pay each month before this happened. And what if they are also then making up payments on their student loans and credit card bills and backpay for utilities? These cannot be loans.

We are a country saddled with debt, and if half the country comes out of this even further buried in debt, no one will be able to participate in that consumer spending that we know ramps up GDP and production so quickly. Another fascinating idea I saw (that will never happen in America, but a girl can dream) is the idea of a debt jubilee. I won’t go into the details, but you can read about it here. The point is: no new debt for people (just businesses over a certain revenue threshold who should receive low or 0% interest loans). Just give away the money. It’s all made up anyway. Just three years ago Trump invented a trillion dollars for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, remember!

I’m Angry.

And now we are getting to the end, to the part where I am angry. We know that something must be done. We have known that something must be done for weeks. We know that we cannot let our economy collapse and let 50 million people lose their jobs. We know that we must keep people in their homes and businesses in their storefronts. And yet, what is our government doing? Arguing over giving $500 billion to corporations with no strings attached. Arguing over whether or not Planned Parenthood (which, by the way, offers healthcare services other than abortions) gets a dime of federal funding? We know what corporations do with massive bailouts because we saw what they did in 2008 when we bailed out the banks with no conditions: nothing. They kept it and lined their own pockets with it. We saw what they did with their massive trickle-down tax break: bought back stock to boost shareholder value.

I’m not saying I disagree with a corporate bailout. Corporations employ millions of people and they need money too, to keep paying their workers to come back on in two months. They need money to service their debt and keep their own lights on. But that is ALL this money can be used for. And it sure as shit better be a loan and not a handout. Limits on executive compensation have to be set. Stock buybacks must be explicitly forbidden. These are things that are holding up the “shit sandwich” bill that is deadlocked in the Senate right now. They can’t pass relief for families and businesses because they are arguing over corporate bailouts? Are you fucking kidding me? Stop worrying about the damn markets and pass something that gives Americans money RIGHT FUCKING NOW. There isn’t time. Sure, some cities have temporarily halted evictions. But not everywhere.

And this isn’t just Republicans blocking bills to get their sweet, sweet bailouts. The 1,400-page wish-list the Democrats proposed today is ludicrous. It calls for changes to voting procedures, reduced airline emissions, changes to collective bargaining, and increasing the minimum wage. I’m not saying these things aren’t good or even related to the crisis (they are both things). But they are not worth delaying even another day of getting something passed. Stop trying to act like this is your party’s moment to get what they want, Pelosi. Put your no-strings-attached corporate bailout aside for a minute, McConnell. Pass legislation that helps families and small businesses TODAY, and you can figure out your other trillion dollar plan once you feel relatively sure that 50% of all small businesses aren’t about to permanently close their doors and tailspin their owners into bankruptcies that will ripple through our economy for decades. Investments banks are estimating we may see a 30% drop in our GDP because of this — more than $6 trillion dollars. How much are we willing to spend to save that?

Trickle Down / Bottoms Up

If ever there was a time to realize that trickle-down economics is bullshit, it’s now. If you give corporations trillions and give people a $1,200 check 10 days after their rent is due, your economy will not come back. If you don’t give people healthcare and paid sick leave, they will go to work sick and spread this disease further. If you arbitrarily tell people that quarantine is over, many of us will continue to stay home regardless, and the economy will barely sputter back into gear. If you tell business owners the only way to save their business is to risk their lives, their employee’s lives, and the lives of others, you will go down in history as the cruelest president in the history of our country, and your precious economy will STILL collapse. The ONLY way to get the economy back without sacrificing hundreds of thousands of your own people, Mr. Trump, is to pump trillions of dollars into the bottom. Because THAT’S how economies work: from the bottom up. Give the money to the people to #staythefuckhome and we will keep our country going. And when the time comes when we can all go back to work, and we don’t have to worry about three months of back rent, we will spend so much friggin’ money so fast. No one cares whether this is your economy or about your reelection right now. We care about whether we can pay our bills, whether we will have jobs when this is over, and whether we’re going to lose our businesses we have built from the ground up. We care about what this world is going to look like when we all finally leave our houses…and how many businesses we once loved in our towns will remain empty, shuttered shells for years to come. And most of all, we care if our parents and grandparents and loved ones are here to see it.

Estados Unidos

I want to close by talking about the first great national catastrophe I experienced in my life and the last time I saw my country truly united. 9/11 was a unique time in American history. President Bush was hated and ridiculed by the left as an idiot and a puppet being marionetted by Dick Cheney. But after the attacks, the one thing we found was unity. Everyone came together to pass legislation to get help where it was needed (and to steal a lot of civil liberties and go to a pointless unwinnable war, but that’s a topic for another day). The point is, it wasn’t partisan bickering. The country saw 3,000 of its citizens perish and put everything aside for one fucking minute. Every single one of us felt the pain of New Yorkers, felt the pain of those who lost their mothers and husbands and fathers and sisters. And this heinous disease that, as of this writing, has killed over 782 Americans, hospitalized thousands more — and is doubling every three days — somehow has us more divided than ever. We have spent more than $6.4 trillion dollars fighting the wars to avenge the deaths of those American people, and today we are arguing about whether or not our grandparents deserve to live? Somehow, I don’t know how we got here, we aren’t thinking about who those lives are.

I am crying right now because our country, which has been so politically divisive these past three years, has a moment to come together. Or at least I thought we did. To say that every American’s life matters equally — even if they’re 75 and have a respiratory disease. Yes, the flu kills tens of thousands, but we don’t just let it. We do everything we can to save each and every one (unless you’re uninsured, of course). We have a moment to say that our citizens truly matter more than anything else. Our government has a moment to say: Don’t worry. We won’t let this happen to you. We will take care of you, because that’s what we’re here for and it’s what’s best for our country in the long run. Politicians out there have a moment to show that they care more about their constituents’ wellbeing than their donors. Journalists and bloggers alike have a moment to stop writing accusatory, defamatory hit pieces sowing discord and widening the gap between us, and instead sharing factual, informative pieces that help both sides of the aisle understand what is happening in our world and our government. Our politicians are failing us right now, but as a nation, we don’t have to succumb to it.

Stop making this a partisan blame game, McConnell; stop trying to jam through your entire agenda, Pelosi; and for the love of God, people, stop acting like letting 10% of our parents and grandparents die is a totally normal thing to suggest.

Save our economy. Save our lives. Pass legislation to help us. All of us. NOW.