Who are we willing to lose as we reopen?
What is the value of a human life? It’s time we talk about it.
What is my Gram worth next to your small business? How many stores would we need to save to make the deaths of a few family members okay?
How valuable is the time spent having dinner with friends? How many people are we willing to lose to be able to sit down with each other again?
These questions are cold as hell; but this is the situation. You’re not being told to stay home for your own good; we’re trading in lives.
I get it: you poured everything into that business. It’s a child to you. I know you’d risk your own life for it. But are you okay if people get killed for it?
I get it: isolation sucks. We need each other. Mental health is on the line. And a life without friends and family isn’t much of a life at all. Most of us would take our chances getting sick if it meant we could rejoin our loved ones. But can we gamble with other people’s lives?
How many people can we lose without losing sleep in order to keep stores from closing for good? Is one ninety-two-year-old a fair exchange for fifty businesses facing bankruptcy? Can we live with that? What about the entire floor of a retirement home — plus one of the three nurses who looked after the tenants?
Where’s the line?
We are okay losing some. We have to be. We don’t shut down for the flu, right? It (plus pneumonia) kills between five and ten thousand annually in Canada. That’s an accepted cost of doing business & living our lives.
What if that number was ten-fold? What if in order to maintain business as usual and hold onto all the things we like to do, we had sacrifice fifty thousand people? That’s one person for every two restaurants in Canada—worth it?
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We don’t know what the price of reopening is going to be. We know it will be steep — with the lockdown in place, the COVID-19 deaths are still just shy of the annual flu — so we’re playing it safe right now.
But as time goes by and we learn more about what we’re facing, we’ll need to have some honest, tough conversations.
This isn’t about weighing liberty against safety.
It’s not about your right to determine your own risk tolerance.
This is about how many people are going to die in our return to normalcy. If we throw open the doors and lose fifty thousand in the process (about one percent of our senior population), can we live with that?
Maybe we can. If you want to argue that the impact on our quality of life — both during this quarantine and into the future as unemployment persists — outweighs that loss of life, you absolutely may.
But don’t pretend that’s not what this is about. Don’t hide behind your civil liberties as you dodge what’s really at stake.
If you want to reopen: figure out your number.