Stop covid or save the economy? We can do both | MIT Technology Review
In late March, President Donald Trump warned against letting the cure be worse than the problem itself and talked of getting the country back to business by Easter, then just two weeks away. Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist and former member of the president s Council of Economic Advisers, warned that an optimistic projection for the cost of closing nonessential businesses until July was almost $10,000 per American household. He told the New York Times that shutting down economic activity to slow the virus would be more damaging than doing nothing at all.
Eventually the White House released models suggesting that letting the virus spread unchecked could kill as many as 2.2 million Americans, in line with the projections of other epidemiologists. Trump backed off his calls for an early reopening, extending guidelines on social distancing through the end of April. But his essential argument remained: that in the coronavirus pandemic, there is an agonizing trade-off between saving the economy and saving lives.
Evidence from research, however, shows that this is a false dichotomy. The best way to limit the economic damage will be to save as many lives as possible.