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Interesting, but I think misses a major point: Many conservatives are not apathetic, nor do they feel less threat. Rather, they see a different balance of threats.

In particular, shutting down our medical system (ex COVID-19) means that large numbers of people will die of other diseases/conditions. Shutting down the economy means that large numbers of people will die of suicide and other syndromes associated with economic deprivation. This isn't just a guess--it's clear and well-documented.

For some reason, these factors seem to be being currently discounted by the Left. I cannot understand why.

I can somewhat answer why the left is discounting the economic factors. The short answer is there is historic precedence that taking strong action against a pandemic will help that economy recover quicker than places that took little to no action. More deaths and a drawn out pandemic had a worse long term economy than a hard and fast shutdown earlier. http://news.mit.edu/2020/pandemic-health-response-economic-r....
It's possible that a long, hard shutdown will result in a better economic result. Looking to 1918, though, raises a lot of questions. It's a small amount of data points from a time when far less reliable information was available.

Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't help us much in determining the total number of excess deaths from these alternatives. I'm guessing that few were even thinking about that question back then.

The larger point, IMO, is that it's not in evidence to assume that it's a tradeoff between saving lives and the economy. It's possible that prioritizing life saving, even at the expense of a worse economy in the short term, saves lives and spurs a better economic recovery.

Edit - for clarity

In 1918 the surviving 2/3 of the population inherited a tremendous amount of financial resources of the 100 million people that died.

The population is now much larger.

Corona is not going to kill more than a million people.

Any references to the economic boom in 1918 are a pipe dream.

It will be interesting to compare Sweden to this to see if this is a valid study or more a case of fitting the data to a narrative.

According to this study Sweden's, who didn't quarantine, economy should crash which it hasn't yet.

So far, it's not obvious that the global null hypothesis, which is that nothing we are doing is making a difference, has been disproven.
How will the economy avoid shutdown when the virus is spreading like wildfire, people are terrified to leave their homes, and hospitals are overwhelmed?

The argument isn't that we can choose between economic shutdown or preventing the spread of the virus. It's that we choose between economic shutdown or the spread of the virus and economic shutdown.

I think people will look at the fatality rate which is very minimal for under 50 age group and leave their homes.

Indeed they are already doing it, the opposite of being terrified.

Especially in Sweden who has no full lockdown.

I think you may be watching too much mainstream media which is filled with fear based reporting.

In my mind, the question on a day-to-day basis is: Given what we know right now, how can we best minimize the total number of deaths (or perhaps quality-adjusted life-years if you want to go that way).

I'm quite risk-averse and started as a total "doomer" in this. When it was clear that we were seeing an exponential process with highly unknown effects, I locked down hard, even before any states or organizations were even discussing it. I'm still in that state, because our household is "old" and has health problems.

But, time has passed, and we're getting a lot more information about this. One thing that's starting to look clear is that people under (say) 50 aren't being killed by this in large numbers. The only reason for them to lock down or act in atypical fashion is to prevent them from spreading the virus to the old (or those with significant medical issues).

It's reasonable to ask whether we could not better protect the elderly by far more targeted measures. Yes, that might cost a lot, but locking down the economy seems to be both costing a lot more and likely less effective in reducing the death count.

Beyond that, it's entirely possible that if we could get most people under 50 to catch the virus (while keeping the elderly safe from it), society would achieve herd immunity and then the elderly would be far more protected than they are under current actions.

Simply shutting down the economy is a holding action. Clearly "flattening the curve" for fear of hitting the ceiling on hospital beds, etc., was worth doing. But now we know a lot more, and have a far wider range of reasonable options. Just being shut down does nothing in itself but delay the inevitable deaths.

A vaccine? Maybe, but it's a real long-shot. We've never had a coronavirus vaccine before, even though there's been a lot of work on it, and it's quite possible that we won't for decades.

We are learning more about treatment options, and that's good. But the clock is ticking and people are already dying from the shutdown itself. It's morally unacceptable to say that those people don't count. Every death matters.

I appreciate you articulating this point so well. This is a very complex situation and people on all ends of the spectrum are being asked to compromise on their values for the sake of public good. Some people are more willing to compromise than others, and that's OK, but it's _hard_.

I really think there are no great choices, only less-bad ones, and even those less-bad ones are a matter of perspective and priorities.

Agree. And in particular, I think that a lot of death and suffering is already baked into the cake, in the sense that there is simply nothing we can do.

That said, we should try to do what we can to lessen the damage. We should all be "all ears" for the best thinking towards this end.

> Shutting down the economy means that large numbers of people will die of suicide and other syndromes associated with economic deprivation.

I think that these arguments sounds empty, because to qualify them we would need to compare them to deaths from pandemic. That is not being done all that much and when being done, the numbers for pandemic unrealistically low.

I would also expect people whose care is well being of poor to promote social distancing measure that does not harm economy - masks, closed beaches, limit amount of people in store simultaneously, mandate hands disinfection upon entering store or other public area.

I would also expect them to support stay-at-home-if-sick policies for workers to protect others. Support people who are old or otherwise at risk and decide they dont want to come to work and replacing them by younger people willing to risk in exchange for more money.

I would expect promoting voting by mail too to avoid crowds to voting stations.

I dont see any of that, I see claims that threat is exaggerated.

How many people will go undiagnosed with heart disease or cancer because hospitals are only seeing emergencies/COVID? Shutting things down has a real and measurable cost and it is going to be massive in terms of lives lost. We didn't all go to work every day for the hell of it.
How many people already went undiagnosed because they couldn't afford their copays or insurance because of the healthcare system in the US? Now all of a sudden we're reopening the economy for "compassion?"
> How many people will go undiagnosed with heart disease or cancer because hospitals are only seeing emergencies/COVID?

Opening up the economy and letting the virus spread is supposed to help with this? How, exactly?

> Shutting down the economy means that large numbers of people will die of suicide and other syndromes associated with economic deprivation. This isn't just a guess--it's clear and well-documented.

Is there data for this? I remember seeing a study that although suicides and drug overdoses went up in 2008-2009, overall mortality went down.

The real world is not as simple as "economy vs lives saved". Most of the businesses that are having problems because of COVID will not recover when the government "opens up". The government can say whatever it wants - people know the virus is out there, and many of those people will not go back to consuming like they did before the pandemic. Most people are not going to go back to dining out at restaurants, going to bars or taking flights all over the place just because the government says that the lockdown is over.

The only way people will go back to consuming like they did before is if the cause of the lockdown is gone. Releasing the lockdown will make the coronavirus spread more, and in turn could very well make the economic effects worse as people get more scared and consume less and travel less for a much longer period of time, as the virus continues to roam free.

It's a possibility. I agree that we need a lot of people to "science the crap" out of this one. It does need to be done, though--we can't just assume than a COVID-19 death saved is a net life saved.
I'm not the most informed person out there, but I haven't seen many conservatives arguing along the specific lines you've laid out here. The conservative perspectives I've personally experienced seem to coalesce around a couple basic positions, namely that:

a) The government is violating basic rights in its reaction to Covid-19, and/or

b) Covid-19 is not a significant threat (and may even be a conspiracy); therefore any government reaction is excessive and unwarranted.

I emphatically agree with you that deaths of despair and lack of access to healthcare are both huge problems in the US. Of course, this was clearly true long before Covid-19 existed, though, so I'm going to be a bit skeptical if I encounter conservatives suddenly championing these issues. [0]

0 - Being that, of course, American conservatives typically oppose policies meant to expand access to healthcare or provide relief to those on the economic margins of our society.

Probably most here would label me a "conservative" (or at least, a "Conservative"), but I generally don't think about things that way. Labels are mostly useful as a pretext for ignoring someone's arguments.

As for skepticism, okay, but reaching across the aisle for common ends is how political change actually happens in the real world. Preaching to the choir is worthless, except for getting re-elected.

This is exactly the perspective that most on the American right in my circles are coming from. The libertarians and economic populists are far more concerned about the long-term implications of endorsing mandatory lockdowns, and contact tracing programs, as well as the effects of effectively shutting down nearly every non-restaraunt business too small to sell non-essential items.

The few conservatives I know who legitimately consider reopening to be first/foremost about minimizing deaths are the kinds of conservatives who live affluent lives working desk jobs they inherited through nepotism, who only endorse the ideas of individual liberty and rights because they think it'll keep their taxes lower, and who endorsed lockdowns until they started to affect their pocketbooks.

There is another balance of threats here as well. Government overreach vs the benefit the government provides. Conservatives are concerned about government overreach. When the governor tells you you can't leave your home that's a massive step in the direction of authoritarianism, while it was initially justified. History shows those in power rarely excise it judicially, especially in times of crisis. The balance of power is tenous and exists because we push back against the government's authority and question its decision making.

The range of government actions taken internationally in response to covid includes, "please stay home" and welding apartment doors shut. I'm not worried about the government welding my door shut, not because I trust my government, but because I know our citizens won't let them. While I appreciate the early lockdowns buying us time in California each park and beach that close scares me more and more, there is no line for those in power they will infringe as much as we let them. I'd rather push back on infringement of liberties too soon rather than too late.

While we don't have to worry about getting our doors welded shut. They government has already shown it can't be trusted to care for us.

The quick money that was promised to go to the people spent a long time working it's way through a corrupt beurocracy as our politicalians all tacked on their agendas and most of it was redirected to line the same pockets the government has for years. People not having money to pay the bills or buy food would be irrational to listen to the government telling them to stay home for their safety.

> The government has already shown it can't be trusted to care for us.

Insofar as socialist medicine is concerned, the US VA is quite good. I do not have the same confidence across the general population. I do believe there is evidence that the incompetence at the executive level has too much sway over something like a national medical plan for citizens and I would not be trusting by default.

I'm a member of the left and how they've acted during this has turned me off.

It's showed me that the left follows their mainstream media narratives just as much as the right follows their mainstream media narratives.

No checking of data, no looking at alternatives, no risk of group rejection to say 'hey maybe this is overblown or incorrect or other alternatives exist'

It's intellectual laziness to just go with a narrative without questioning it to see if it stands up to scrutiny... and the mainstream media just profits off of the sensationalism so it's not in the business of providing rational level headed analysis.

i don't why this is being downvoted. this is both interesting and accurate and brings up a good point about other's perspective of the situation.
> Many conservatives are not apathetic, nor do they feel less threat.

But IIUC, the study is predicated on research asking about how much of a threat these people feel in the first place. That there are other, significant threats doesn't mean checking the box that says "I don't think COVID-19 is very serious" - or if it does, that's itself interesting.

That said, your post is still important because it's good to remember that even while there are trends, none of these groups of people are homogeneous.

First, please support this statement with some forecasts or well established documentation that would quantify the problem:

> In particular, shutting down our medical system (ex COVID-19) means that large numbers of people will die of other diseases/conditions. Shutting down the economy means that large numbers of people will die of suicide and other syndromes associated with economic deprivation. This isn't just a guess--it's clear and well-documented.

Second, and I see this often in "conservative" postings - this ignores the fact that "the other team gets to bat too". In other words, the virus gets a vote.

There is no evidence that the economy will recover without containing the virus. The economy had already cratered - OpenTable had documented a 74% drop in reservations before the first closure order occured - without public confidence that they won't be acquiring and spreading the disease.

The way to contain the virus is to 1) lock down to reduce the epidemic to a size that is manageable by other means than shutdown, and 2) put in place the necessary staff, technology, and infrastructure to contain it by less onerous means.

"2" means: widespread, no-charge testing with results in hours, not days; very rapid contact tracing, which means large staff doing so; and quarantine of contacts outside the home when appropriate, so that inter-dwelling infection does not occur. This is working in several countries. The US, being somehow exceptional, seems to believe it can't work here.

The problem with the conservative-led "let 'er rip, they're going to die anyway" approach is that it doesn't get the economy back. It just inflames the epidemic, which continues to crater the economy for the next several years.

I don't understand why conservatives can't see these things. I suspect it is some form of motivated reasoning that makes them reject reality in this form.

Don't have time to find the links, but one study indicated that Japan had an excess of 10,000 or more (??) excess suicides per year as a result of its economic downturn in the 90s (?).

And a recent paper in the UK asserted that there have already been 20,000 (??) excess deaths due to people who need cancer screening and treatment not going (or not being able to go) to medical facilities.

Perhaps most tragically, people with stroke symptoms are far less likely to go to the ER in the first critical hours to possibly receive (clot-busting?) medical treatment. Wait a day or two, and it's too late.

My memory on those numbers might be wrong, but if anything, I think they're too low. But these are just for a few cases in a few places. Extrapolate that out to the whole situation, are we're talking about a huge amount of death and suffering caused by the lockdowns.

It's true that many people (like me) are going to stay locked down for months if not years no matter what the government says. That seems like more of an argument for letting up (like Sweden) than locking down harder.

Most importantly is to understand that there is no endgame other than herd immunity. That might be achieved by a vaccine, but many scientists doubt that this will be had soon, if ever. No one is seriously talking about wide-spread vaccination in less than 12-18 months, and even that seems wildly unrealistic. More realistically, we might simply have to "choose" which 70% (or whatever) of the population gets the virus and when. We should choose the young and healthy, and "when" should be pretty soon, if we want to save lives.

In any case, this needs to be studied hard and quickly by lots of boring, disinterested people. We can't just stop with "everyone who wants to loosen the lockdown is a money-grubbing bastard". People are dying.

Ideology may set rough attractors and no-go areas, but it's naive to think that our current battle lines have been drawn by individuals independently pondering their own positions.

At a deep level, our experience of reality has become wholly moderated by mass media. Reds and Blues are watching different channels, and thereby experiencing different realities. It's as simple as that.

Nonconformance to a media narrative is punished by all, in a distributed fashion. If you express an independent point in a Blue flavor, you will be attacked by both the ever-present Reds as well fellow Blues for breaking rank (and vice-versa, obviously).

Even this comment itself would be better if I tied in some basic examples. But they would inherently reflect my own filter bubble, opening my point up to partisan scrutiny looking to reject self-reflection xor continue caricaturizing the others.

> Note that our results cannot say which of these is happening in greater measure.

That's okay. Every reader can figure it out.

I couldn't; could you help me figure it out?
It's the other team.

My comment was a joke, pointing at my expectation that most readers will come to a conclusion despite the warning.

> Out of six, the strongest effects emerged for goals that involved government-imposed social distancing rules. Conservatives oppose the government telling them when they can or cannot leave their homes; liberals support such policies. Because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that conservatives dislike, conservatives appear motivated to downplay the severity. Or conversely, because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that liberals do like, liberals seem motivated to magnify the threat.

Ugh I hate when people do this, it seems like lazy thinking. Decreased government intervention is a terminal goal for many individuals, but increased government intervention is not. Liberals are more willing to trade government intervention for lives saved.

> We found that the general effect of ideology on perceived COVID-19 threat significantly decreased at higher levels of experience with COVID-19. Conservatives view the disease as less threatening than liberals, but this difference shrinks among participants who have been more impacted by the disease.

Looks like the divide is not entirely different values, and that it's at least partially driven my misinformation.

* I know there are probably some liberals for who this is a terminal goal but it's a vanishingly small amount.

That sounds more likely to me, and completely agreed on the point that increased government for the sake of it has never been a point of conversation for me I can think of with someone who identifies as liberal where they were arguing that more government is the end goal, but there may be specific things they think the government should handle (healthcare). On the reverse, in my experience talking to more conservative people, I have had that topic of "smaller government" come up multiple times.

So my anecdotal experiences align with your points pretty well.

> increased government intervention is not

Seems like a weird, pedantic half-truth. It's like "I'm not a racist, but ..." except for government. "I don't want increased government intervention... except for the areas of healthcare, housing, education, guns, the economy, free speech, religion, banking, labor, technology and a few dozen other areas, those I do want increased government intervention in".

I get that it doesn't come from "I love authoritarianism and want more of it" but the practical end is the same when the solution to every problem is "More government regulations or interventions"

It can be seen as a corrective to 'let the free market decide everything,' which is clearly showing its limitations in responding to the COVID-19 crisis.
For quite a few of the items in your list, the solution from liberals tends to be "Different government regulations" or "Different beneficiaries of government regulations". Which is quite different from more government.
I think the post is on the right track, but fails to even mention the urban/rural divide in the US, which is heavily weighted liberal/conservative.

The two groups are experiencing differently—to rural folks describing it as a non-problem is largely accurate, to inner-city liberals the catastrophe is accurate as well.

Combine that with a distrust of government in rural areas and you have a pretty solid case. It's clear that attempts at "one size fits all" policy making across a country the size of the US is problematic. States the size of California are also approaching the limits of governability in this situation, see the unrest between different counties.

What are you talking about? It explicitly calls that out as 1 of 2 theories

" After all, the pandemic has thus far tended to hit more liberal regions, like New York, harder than more conservative regions. It is therefore possible that conservative and liberal differences are driven by a divergence in actual experiences with COVID-19"

That snippet doesn’t address density as the driving factor, as if the distribution were happenstance.
> I think the post is on the right track, but fails to even mention the urban/rural divide in the US, which is heavily weighted liberal/conservative.

There is a similar trend in Canada, Australia, and to some degree the UK.

> The two groups are experiencing differently—to rural folks describing it as a hoax is largely accurate, to inner-city liberals a catastrophe is accurate as well.

That is not what word hoax means. Hoax means that the thing does not exists at all and is made up. It does not mean "I personally dont have the very same problem yet, therefore I dont believe you when you tell me it is happening".

It depends on what you define as _The hoax_, and there is a great diversity of opinions.

It can mean the virus doesn't exist

It can mean the virus isn't as bad as claimed

It can mean the virus mitigations aren't worth the tradeoff

I wasn't done, please don't jump to reply in the first few minutes of writing. ;-)
> First, might conservatives actually be less threatened by the current pandemic? After all, the pandemic has thus far tended to hit more liberal regions, like New York, harder than more conservative regions.

And conservative regions that are hard-hit, like Florida, are actively suppressing information on how bad the outbreak is.[1][2]

It'll be interesting to see how the conservative narrative changes as the outbreak becomes undeniable. The CDC projections are pointing toward 100,000 dead sometime in June[3]. That's a lot of parents and grandparents. At some point, it will be almost impossible to not be personally affected.

[1]: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/01/flor-m01.html

[2]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/04/29/florida-medi...

[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecas...