Who lives, who dies, who decides

Date:

The virus makes us weigh the value of a life. We can’t know if we’ve gotten it right.

In October 1987, Jessica McClure, an 18-month-old girl in Midland, Tex., fell down a well. The nation followed with rapt attention for 58 hours as rescue workers, mining experts and local volunteers drilled a shaft parallel to the well, then tunneled horizontally through dense rock to reach Baby Jessica. Nobody fretted about the costly rush to free her. No one suggested that there were better charitable causes than the generous trust fund established for her by strangers and well-wishers.

Now imagine you receive an email inviting you to a community meeting to discuss whether to place fencing around local wells and other hazards. You are not likely to attend. Can you imagine anything more dull? Also, you wonder: Is it really smart to spend thousands of dollars blocking off small holes in the ground?

As humans, we don’t know how to weigh the tragic trade-offs among money, health and life. Right now, policymakers are deciding whether to seriously damage our economy to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, or to accept additional illnesses and deaths as the cost of warding off other suffering: Economists and public health researchers note the rising tide of suicides, fatal overdoses and other tragedies connected with deindustrialization, joblessness and poverty. Such “deaths of despair” are reminders that economic trauma, too, destroys human lives.

Read full article here.

Harold Pollack – The Washington Post – March 27, 2020.

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