Right, but I think some of that suicide rate comes from the lack of "purpose" (it's silly that we rely on our jobs for purpose but we really do), or more broadly the desynchronization of one's internal schedule that many of us have experienced (which leads to worse sleep and therefore higher mortality).
I also think that given we know about the level of competence of our government, it will be very difficult for "real" safety nets to be put into place. That's not even getting to the partisan divide inherent to our system.
So in my eyes, we had one big problem, covid, and turned it into two big problems, covid and an economy in ruin. And these two problems affect a greater set of individuals than either one alone. Since a huge number of deaths from Covid are those who weren't working because they're 70+.
Lastly, one of the most "famous" social safety nets in America is social security, which is a farce that is known to redistribute money from the poor to the rich. (It is an eternal frustration of mine that the Left in America is so heavily in favor of social security despite it being flawed from its inception) [1]
You are missing the point in that if nothing was done in terms of trying to (at least temporarily) contain COVID, then the economy would be just as bad off.
We're currently at 50K deaths in the US, largely in a four week period. I think it's safe to say that the shutdown has cut the death rate in half, if not more. If 100K people die in 4 weeks in the US, the people will shut the economy down whether the government initiates it or not.
Either way we're screwed. And I think your data is far off in terms of IFR and CFR. Imagine the IFR being a magnitude higher for COVID versus influenza. I personally think this is a safe guess based on what we've seen in a wide variety of environments, complicated by different testing methodologies etc etc. So we'll use 1% for the IFR.
Now current thought is the R0 is between 2 and 5. Hopefully closer to 2 since R0 dramatically affects the percentage of infections required to reach herd immunity. But to be simple, we'll assume we need 50% to reach herd immunity. So we'll use 164M as the number of Americans needing to be infected before we can "return to normal."
With 164M cases, and an IFR of 1%, 1.6M Americans will die. An additional 9% will need hospitalization, but survive. That's 14.8M.
Say we're off by a lot and "it's just a flu" with an IFR of 0.1%. You'll have 164K fatalities, and we'll still have the 14.8m hospitalizations. Say the hospitalization rate is off by a magnitude, it's still 1.48M.
There's no way our country can operate "normally" with these types of numbers.
I will grant you the lack of purpose being a motivator for suicide, but none of us know how that would transpire during a global pandemic. I know there is debate over the specifics over Maslow's hierarchy of needs nowadays, but generally speaking I think a lot of us will focus less on these internal issues in times of external danger.
Also if we are going to use government incompetency as an argument here. I would throw it right back at you and say I have little faith in the government implementing a reopening plan that doesn't either kill people or damage the economy long term.
Lastly it is a false dichotomy to present a choice between protecting people from COVID-19 or protecting the economy. If we refuse to do the latter, we are going to ruin the economy anyway. Hundreds of thousands of people dying would certainly put a damper on demand. And while there are certainly people protesting about reopening sooner, I don't think think movie theaters would be selling out if they opened tomorrow.
I also think that given we know about the level of competence of our government, it will be very difficult for "real" safety nets to be put into place. That's not even getting to the partisan divide inherent to our system.
So in my eyes, we had one big problem, covid, and turned it into two big problems, covid and an economy in ruin. And these two problems affect a greater set of individuals than either one alone. Since a huge number of deaths from Covid are those who weren't working because they're 70+.
Lastly, one of the most "famous" social safety nets in America is social security, which is a farce that is known to redistribute money from the poor to the rich. (It is an eternal frustration of mine that the Left in America is so heavily in favor of social security despite it being flawed from its inception) [1]
[1] See Milton Friedman's excellent take https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCdgv7n9xCY