Opinion: How many deaths can we afford? DW
Opinion
28/03/2020 | Henrik Böhme
Just two weeks into this crisis some are actually calculating how many deaths society can accept to salvage the economy. For DW's Henrik Böhme, this is unacceptable.
... We're beginning to juggle bigger numbers than during the global financial crisis. The US has passed a $2 trillion (€1.8 trillion) relief package..So now the question many are asking is, of course: Who will pay for them? Is it going to be like after the financial crisis when all states were in debt up to their necks...
Now, once again, we're talking about trade-offs. How many dead people can or do we want to afford? Or, to put it differently: How much is a human life worth to us? Are we even allowed to make such calculations, as private equity manager and former manager of Goldman Sachs' Germany operation, Alexander Dibelius, has been doing? Dibelius has publicly wondered whether it is right to protect the 10% of the population that is at particularly high risk from coronavirus while allowing the economy to be affected so badly that the fundamentals of our affluent societies could end up with permanent damage.
Is it possible to be any colder or more calculating?...What more is needed than the haunting and vivid pictures from Italy? Pictures of doctors who have to decide whom to treat and whom to let die. Pictures of a collapsing health system.... This is what this is mostly about: preventing such collapse. For if hospitals in Germany or other countries go through what Italian hospitals have experienced, a lot of other people will die as well as coronavirus patients, such as those who have suffered heart attacks or strokes. These deaths may well be mere collateral damage for Dr. Dibelius, like the million deaths and more that Imperial College London has forecast for the US. I have a question for this medic-cum-banker: Have you read about the 20-year-old medical students in the French city of Mulhouse who had to pack the dead into body bags and transport them away? ...we are not allowed to make such calculations. We are not allowed to sort out human beings. We cannot lock older people away so that the economy grows again (and in any case, young people are also dying from the virus). Scientists are, of course, aware of their responsibility; they can see the social and economic damage the current measures are causing and will adjust them accordingly.
... No, we have to weather this temporary and brief pause together. We have to look after the little flower of solidarity that has emerged in this crisis in the midst of what is an extremely egoistic society. Solidarity is the real weapon against corona.
https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-how-many-deaths-can-we-afford/a-52932993
= new reply since forum marked as read
