For all the people in this thread lamenting the “selfish” people who “don’t give a shit about people suffering and dying”, or people who “can’t be bothered to even notice people dying”...for all those people, this topic has been strangely lacking.

How many people will die from the impending depression? We will lose 500,000 to COVID, and then 10 million to starvation and disease from the homelessness pandemic to come. And all these people will cry out desperately “but...muh Trump!”, flailing their arms around about how the stupid US government could easily just implement a UBI or something and nationalise housing and carry us through the depression.

But again, the same hypocrisy remains, since the entire world will die. I have family in Pakistan, and these people are literally starving. People scrape by day to day, their only source of income is business that relies on customers, and they don’t have big daddy government to help them. The death toll world wide could be in the hundreds of millions just from the economic impact of the worldwide shutdown.

What’s more is so many of these deaths will happen in developing countries which rely on the global capitalist supply chain to survive. These countries will starve because we in the West can’t bear to see our nice white grandmothers die, while the third world has been dealing with death, disease, and millions dead every year because they can’t afford infrastructure anyway. This lockdown, ultimately, is a death sentence on the developing world imposed by first world countries that can’t bear to live in even half the reality that the third world lives with every year, and so our Internet warriors, health agencies, and supply chains mobilise massive shutdowns to save a few hundred thousand here in exchange for the death and suffering of millions abroad.

None of this stuff is simple. Economic depression brings death the same as disease. I just hate our naïveté about the true costs of all this.