The great Thomas Sowell observed, “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” Thus, when I hear someone say, “You just can’t be too careful.” I generally respond, “Oh yes you can…” For example, here in Hilton Head, when they evacuate for a possible hurricane, that involves evacuating our local hospital as well. And I point out that you simply cannot take a hospital full of very sick people, transport them all hundreds of miles over crowded interstates, move them into another hospital which is suddenly overcrowded and understaffed, then transport all those very sick people right back to where they started from, without killing at least some people. Not to mention traffic accidents on packed highways, COPD patients trying to get their home O2 to work in hotel rooms, people who evacuate and forget their heart meds, and so on. Hard to say who, or how many, but when you evacuate, you know you’re killing some people.

The idea, of course, is that you’re saving the lives of other people. Hopefully, a lot more people are saved than killed, of course. But the number of people saved is uncertain – it depends on if a catastrophic hurricane actually hits or not. So you never know. But you do know that you’re killing at least some people. That’s a given, and it must be considered in making decisions like this. So the risk-reward calculation has a built-in risk, but only a possible reward. And I’m starting to suspect that, as a society, we are having more and more trouble considering such risk-reward decisions.

As we become more wealthy, we predictably become more concerned with security. Those who are well-off naturally become more risk-averse. They fear any disturbance in the status quo. This is not a criticism. It’s only natural.

But now, rather than thinking, “I think this small risk is worth the large benefit,” we now say, “You just can’t be too careful.” And before you know it, we respond to a respiratory virus by buying toilet paper.

I’m not criticizing our government’s response to the Coronavirus. These are difficult decisions, with lots of unknowns. Hard to know what to proper course of action is. I don’t envy those who are making these decisions.

But I think they may be trying so hard to avoid risk, and taking such draconian steps to mitigate possible future events, that they are causing enormous damage now. By essentially quarantining the entire country, the damage they are causing is real, obvious, enormous, and unavoidable.

This quarantine is undoubtedly killing people. For example, I have an 82-year-old diabetic patient who had some burning with urination last week, but didn’t call in because she was afraid to come to my office. Her urinary tract infection went untreated, got worse, and now she is in the ICU with urosepsis. A couple of days ago, I was pretty sure she was going to die. Then she got a little better. But this morning she had a pulmonary embolus (not an unusual complication in a hospital). And now she’s in renal failure. So she’s in dire straits again. Will she survive? I’m not sure. But this could have been treated with $5 worth of antibiotics last week.

If she dies, it will be the Coronavirus that killed her. Or rather, it will be our response to the Coronavirus that killed her. As Thomas Sowell might say, our effort to avoid risk was not without risk.

But her death won’t show up in the Coronavirus statistics. Because she died of urosepsis.

My Uncle Fred might describe this as the seen vs. the unseen.

She could have called in for a prescription, but she didn’t. She could have made it out of the hospital without a pulmonary embolus or renal failure, but that’s not how it worked out.

Again, though, none of this would have happened without the terrifying news coverage and the widespread closures of just about everything. She acted appropriately, she thought, under the circumstances. But her actions may prove fatal.

And that’s just one lady in South Carolina. This sort of thing is undoubtedly happening all over the country. People are losing their livelihoods and losing their lives.

Which may be acceptable, of course, if there is an upside to our response to this virus.

But there had better be an upside. And the worse things get, one can’t help but think that there had better be an absolutely enormous upside.

And there may be.

But we’re talking about a virus which has been spreading across the world for the past four months and has killed around 11,000 people so far. On a planet of 7.5 billion people, there have been 11,000 deaths. Mostly in countries whose response was much less robust than ours. Remember, we have around 35,000 deaths a year from influenza in the United States. And Coronavirus has killed less than a third of that so far, on the entire planet.

So far, we’ve had 235 deaths from the Coronavirus in the United States. How many more deaths would we have had if our response had been less robust? Probably some. It’s impossible to say, of course. And perhaps the benefit over the next month or two could be even greater. Perhaps. I’m not sure.

But how many people have we killed in the meantime, to get that possible benefit? I’m not sure. But probably a lot more than you might expect. And they won’t show up on the lists of deaths from Coronavirus, because they died of urosepsis or something. But they are definitely dead. And the possible benefit is, well, it’s possible. We’ll see.

Not to mention the human costs. Missing weddings and funerals, missing basketball tournaments, missing college graduations, plus all the bankruptcies and other agonies being suffered by those whose finances are being gradually or rapidly destroyed. All that counts. Or at least, it should.

Remember that this is a virus with several treatments that seem to be working well. Tuberculosis drugs, malaria drugs, immunosuppressive drugs, and even Z-packs seem to work to one degree or another. We have several vaccines in development that seem to work well.

Again, there may be a large potential reward for our response to this virus. But in our desperate attempts to avoid risk, we have done real damage which is so huge it’s essentially impossible to calculate. So now, the worse the damage gets, day by day, it would seem that the benefit had better be absolutely enormous.

And from what we’ve seen so far, um, I don’t know…