I have recently been reading William Shirer’s excellent, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. What is striking, and probably unknown to most people is that World War II (at least in Europe) was the high price the world paid to purchase a scant few weeks of peace for the rest of Europe at the expense first of Austrians and later Czechoslovakians.

Granted, Europe had just suffered through the horrors of World War I, so perhaps Neville Chamberlain should be forgiven a bit of his naivete concerning Adolf Hitler, but the megalomaniac dictator’s continued lies and broken promises should have been a clue to the British leader long before Nazi tanks rolled into Poland.  The irony is that had France and Great Britain stood up to Hitler when he moved on Austria, the German dictator most likely would have been overthrown by his own generals (who were not eager for a conflict they knew they would certainly lose). 

Instead, Hitler was appeased which only fed his obscene thirst for power and his irrational and evil hatred of the Jewish people. Unfortunately by the time that Chamberlain (and to be fair, he wasn’t alone) learned what the true cost of peace at any price would be, history had lost its chance to avoid an unimaginably deadly second world war and a holocaust of indescribable horror. It was too late; the bill was due and millions of mostly innocents would pay the price.

So what does all that have to do with coronavirus? Well, the idea that we should bear any economic price to prevent as many coronavirus deaths as possible is akin to peace at any price. The truth is, like Chamberlain, we are almost certainly only deferring the cost of the pandemic and as in World War II, the bill for such naivete, when it arrives, may be much larger than the cost of the pandemic itself would have been.

Life is precious. No one wants anyone to lose a loved one, friend, or colleague to this disease. However, this is true of all diseases, accidents, and other things that cause people to die.  Nearly 60,000 people die from the flu each year on average, for example. And last year, nearly 35,000 people died in traffic accidents. Yet we haven’t outlawed cars and we never instituted a lockdown for the flu in the past.

Coronavirus, is, admittedly, different from those things.  It appears to be much deadlier than the flu (although just how much more so is uncertain and apparently not so much as initially feared) and it is particularly hard on the elderly and people with underlying health problems. It is, as President Trump has described it, an invisible and chilling enemy. People are scared, and no one can blame them for being scared. I am not indifferent to these fears. My mom (mid-seventies) and my dad (late seventies) both have underlying health conditions. My own health could be better. My parents are rightly concerned about their prospects should they be exposed to this virus, as am I, both for them and for myself. I think my parents (and anyone who knows themselves to be at risk) should lock down—I mean really lock down, not this half-baked, sort of semi-lockdown that the country has been engaged in for the past two months—one that has arguably failed to slow the virus but has successfully wrecked the economy.

Such self-lock down by the most vulnerable people should continue until we have a vaccine or we have achieved verifiable herd immunity by letting everyone else (and here is the tricky part) go back to work, school, restaurants, gyms, bars, massage parlors, etc.  Why is it tricky? Because yes, some people will die. Why? Well, because some people may not know they have underlying health conditions, some may decide to risk it and suffer the consequences (others may get lucky), some may just get unlucky and be exposed in some bizarre manner, some will have family members selfishly expose them, some will have family members accidentally expose them, and some will die for reasons we just don’t really understand (the same way this happens with the flu and countless other diseases that are usually just uncomfortable but occasionally are fatal to an unlucky small percentage). Again, why? Not to sound callous here, but because we are all, after all, mortal.

There is ample evidence that the lockdown, such that it is, just is not working. After all, we have been in lockdown now for nearly two months and yet the number of infected individuals for a disease with a 14-day incubation period keeps rising. Fortunately, the mortality rate keeps dropping.  However, even a low mortality rate applied to a massive infection number will produce hundreds of thousands of deaths.

So, isn’t the lockdown worth it? Well, maybe not. Turns out, coronavirus is not the only thing that kills people. In the United States about 5,000 people each day are diagnosed with cancer. By one estimate, about 80,000 cases have likely gone undiagnosed during the COVID crisis. Many of those may be diagnosed later but for some aggressive cancers this delay will be the difference between beating the cancer and dying. Others who have already been diagnosed have missed crucial chemotherapy treatments because these have been postponed or the patients are too afraid to risk going into health care settings, especially with immune systems often compromised by cancer treatments.

And it isn’t just cancer. Many elective heart surgeries and other important elective medical procedures have been postponed either by facilities or the fearful patients themselves. Don’t let the term “elective” fool you. These procedures are not “elective” in the sense that they are not needed but in the sense that the patient elects to have surgery (which carries some risk) that may prolong their lives rather than foregoing such risk and accepting a potentially shorter life. Many people make these choices every day and most choose to take the risk for a longer life—though virus fears have dramatically altered this calculus. 

The human cost of lost jobs, lost opportunity, and lost optimism is harder to determine but no less real. The virus is no doubt wreaking a tremendous toll on our country. It will continue to do so no matter what we do. The question to be answered: Is the short-term benefit worth the long-term cost? We are flattening the curve on corona virus deaths, but we are also flattening the curve on our economy. And remember, a totally flat line is a symbol of death.