Quarantine costs lives too!

Suicide rates on the rise as a result of stay-at-home order.

According to ABC7 News (linked above), there are an increasing number of suicides happening as a result of the lockdown. John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, CA, reports that the numbers of suicide cases during the quarantine period exceeds the number of deaths from the virus. That is, they've seen about a year's worth of suicide attempts in just four weeks.

It should come as no surprise that extended human isolation is extremely taxing on the human mental state. This is actually one of the reasons why prisons effective at what they do. However, imposing this on an entire nation (and indeed the world) whilst framing human contact as traitorous, murderous, sociopathic, criminal, anti-social and itself a sign of mental weakness and you have a recipe for the breakdown of mental well being on a grand scale.

Either way, lives will be lost. The question is how many?

The "there is no alternative" discussion online and indeed the mainstream media, is that we have two choices: quarantine and save lives, or freedom and cost lives. The fact is, lives will be lost regardless. This is akin to the cold calculus of war: sacrifice few to save many. But are we really saving more lives?

We really need to have a more opened minded discussion regarding the response to the virus. We are a democracy after-all. There are more than two sides to the story, and they all deserved to be heard. Without weighing up the real costs and real benefits of each response, we cannot make conclusive policy and say that was definitively the best approach.

We are otherwise dealing with a Nirvana Fallacy where policy is not guided by science, reason, ethics, but by unicorns and wishes.