The problem with your question is that the options are shut down or lots of people dying. Realistically, it looks like we're going to have a shut down and then lots of people dying. The shut downs won't stop the virus. They will only delay it and they won't delay it long enough for a vaccine or treatment unless we get really really lucky.
Not only will the shutdown only delay deaths, the shutdown itself will cause deaths. With 3 million people ALREADY losing their jobs after less than a few weeks of shutdowns, we could see 10 to 20 million losing their jobs if this lasts several more months. Suicides alone from the shutdown would exceed the loss expected from the virus. Then as into that the number of people kicked of healthcare from losing their jobs or that just don't have enough money to afford that expensive health treatment. Now beyond jobs effect look at what will happen to the crime rate and murder rate when poverty strikes, and as others have said if you no longer afford car or home insurance, now people on the brink lose more than everything from fires or accidents. Im not about to calculate the exact number of ancillary deaths from a shutdown, and maybe it is very difficult to quantify which is why no one is doing it but as the president said the cure can't be worse than the disease.
Suicides alone from the shutdown would exceed the loss expected from the virus.
It is unlikely but possible that suicides from the shutdown will exceed deaths from the disease. But it is absolutely not true that they will exceed projected deaths from letting the disease run its course unchecked.
Here is a parallel. We are afraid of buildings catching fire, so we build sprinkler systems into them. But the result is that in actual fires, the water damage from the sprinkler system exceeds the damage from the fire. That's because there is a fairly small fire and a big wet area from the sprinklers.
Is this an argument for not having the sprinkler system? Of course not! Because the damage from the sprinkler system is far less than what the damage from an unchecked fire would have been.
Suicides may very well exceed the loss. The current virus estimates are for 240,000 deaths/year. Suicides from 20 million layoffs could easily exceed that. The comparison to sprinklers is a false equivalency. It would be more like, if one house catches fire, should you turn on the sprinkler system for the entire city?
Do you have a source for that estimate and the assumptions it is based on.
By my estimate, the deaths in the USA alone, with no lockdowns, is around 2 million this year. Other attempts that I’ve seen to estimate it come out with similar figures.
This has been explained over and over again. The goal of reducing the spread of the virus is to allow our medical system to cope with the massive load.
A too-large rush of cases will overload our system and result in medical providers succumbing to the virus as well, resulting in it shutting down.
That would result in millions more suffering and possibly dying.
Even in ideal conditions we don't have much impact on the lethality of the virus. If we are in a scenario where everyone gets infected lots of people are going to die. Medical care can change that by some percent but not enough to change it from "lots of people" dying. For example, something like 2/3s of patients that go on ventilators will die. Of the 1/3 that do survive a significant chunk, if not the majority, will have significant complications. They will live for another few months to a year with a poor quality of life before dying.
That might make you think a ventilator surge might save 10-20% of people who otherwise would have died. But that's not true because we can choose who gets the ventilators. The actual difference in death rate will be small because we will stop ventilating the cases that still have a 95%+ chance of dying even with ventilating. Ultimately, the impact of the ventilator surge is going to be a bunch of 80+ year old patients with significant comorbidities getting pointless interventions. It's going to save few lives and will only marginally impact the mortality rate.
Shutdown won't delay long enough for a vaccine, but it has already delayed long enough for improved treatment capacity and possibly improved treatments.
Every day of delay increases the chances of treatments being more available and better understood.
