Peter Singer and Michael Plant weigh the tradeoffs between a continued government lockdown to contain the pandemic, which aims to save lives, and a reopening of the country for business, in order to stave off an economic meltdown. With stock markets tumbling across the globe and millions of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits, Trump wants to get back to business, saying: “We cannot let the cure be worse than the disease.”

The authors say Trump is right, arguing “fewer will die of COVID-19, as well as other transmissible diseases,” despite its spread. But the question is how to weigh the health benefits of a lockdown “against the costs of unemployment, social isolation, and widespread bankruptcies?” No doubt social distancing measures – limiting close contact between people by banning gatherings, closing schools and offices, encouraging remote work and urging people to maintain a six-foot distance from one another — are vital to slowing the spread of the virus.

Desperate to prevent the economy from tanking Trump said he would reassess the recommended period for keeping businesses shut and millions of workers at home, amid millions of job losses. While public health officials maintain it will take several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion, Congressional Republicans resent that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, pushing Trump to find ways to let people start returning to work, and to revamp the economy.

Business owners are divided – some are eager to end the more draconian measures that have been put in place, others – sharing medical experts’ concern – would rather endure the pain at once rather than face repeated, disruptive orders to stop activities in the event of a second wave of COVID-19 infections. Should Trump defy advice, there will be businesses still fearful to reopen, and employees fearful of going to work, because thousands of new infections are still being diagnosed each day.

As the economy slides deeper into recession and 16 million jobs gone in the past three weeks, a trade-off will become more urgent. Difficult compromises between doing everything possible to contain the pandemic and to save the economy will have to be reached. To keep the lockdown until “not a single person on Earth” is free from COVID-19 “may never happen.” It could take a year, “perhaps much long” until we have a vaccine to beat the virus.

The authors proposes to limit “our collective thinking” about COVID-19 and focus on the “identified cause effect”, targeting a “specific, known victim” rather than “each of a larger, vaguely defined set of individuals.” Instead of pitting “lives saved” against “lost GDP,” we need to “put them into some common unit” in making trade-offs. He believes unemployment following a lockdown, would have a very serious effect on well-being, and particularly for poorer people. And poor countries can not afford to provide that kind of assistance for their poor people.

According to the authors people will die if we open up, because of contracting the virus. But the consequences of not opening up are so severe that we will have no choice, because more people – young and old –are going to die because they are not going to get enough to eat or other basics due to the loss of income. A lockdown brings “real social and economic costs: social isolation, unemployment, and widespread bankruptcies,” hurting more people, than a pandemic kills.

He urges us to assess the overall cost to everybody in terms of years of lost – loss of quality of life, loss of well-being, due to draconian measures. “If we then estimate how much lockdowns cost the economy, we can estimate the years of healthy life we are likely to gain now by containing the virus and compare it to how many years we are likely to lose later from a smaller economy.”

COVID-19 “will be with us for some time. Are months of government-enforced lockdowns the right policy? We don’t know, and as moral philosophers, we can’t answer this question on our own. Empirical researchers need to take on the challenge of calculating the effects, not in terms of wealth or health, but in the ultimate currency, wellbeing.”

The problem is that the sense of “wellbeing” is individual and subjective. Yet containing a pandemic requires collective actions based on one-size-fits-all policies or approaches that are not tailored to individual needs. It explains why people look to China for inspiration. The authoritarian regime in Beijing is known for its utter disregard for human rights and civil liberties, placing state sovereignty before the collective good, let alone the wellbeing of individual citizens.