How Life is Valued: COVID-19

When lockdowns were enforced, there was a large population of people who did not agree, their concerns were the economy collapsing, or maybe felt like a right was taken away from them. And we have seen research that has shown us that the economic status of the U.S. after lockdowns have suffered in multiple different aspects and we have seen the economic status of different countries as a result of the different ways they dealt with the pandemic. Essentially, the different rules (lockdowns, masks, social distancing, etc.) were enforced to prevent more casualties, but that also meant unemployment, mental health issues and more. With that, the bigger question is “What is more important, lives saved or life satisfaction?”

Side 1:

It depends on how you see it, you could say that preventing casualties is the #1 priority, that a life saved is a life saved and there is no question about it. Or you could say money does not amount to another person's life, no matter how much the economy tanks, it will not amount to saving thousands of lives. Which of course is true, it has been said that the rules that were enforced saved 900,000-2.7m lives roughly, which is an extremely high number.

Side 2:

You could also see it as—

An individual's life is extremely important, but an individual's quality of life is more important. But, that is not saying if your quality of life is terrible that means you shouldn’t have a right to life, but it is saying, in the long run how many lives are we truly saving? We are currently saving thousands of lives, which is amazing. Nonetheless, that does not take out the factors like unemployment rates, losing the ability to socialize “normally”, mental health , and suicide and depression rates going up. During those few years, school went online meaning students entering their first year of middle school, highschool, and college were sitting in their rooms on a screen for 7 hours “learning”. Even though these students still got an education, that doesn’t change the amount of hours that were spent on that computer a week, and during those hours you were not interacting with anyone else. The point is, even though COVID casualties were prevented, that does not mean other lives were saved, and that does not mean the quality of life was saved.