Sacrificing Grandma to revive the economy is a tragic 'misreading' of America's options, MSNBC's Chris Hayes argues

The U.S. is rapidly progressing toward having the worst active COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in the world, and "in order to forestall serious doom and death, we've had to shut down enormous parts of the economy, which has obviously caused massive human misery and economic dislocation," Chris Hayes said on MSNBC Monday night. And a week into that shutdown, President Trump "is now listening to voices on the right that say 'Really? What's a million seniors when you're thinking about the whole economy?' That's slightly caricatured, but only slightly."

But the "growing chorus on the right saying the benefit of keeping people alive is not worth the cost to the economy" is badly "misreading what the choices are right now," Hayes said. "There is no option to just let everyone go back out and go back to normal if a pandemic rages across the country and infects 50 percent of the population and kills a percentage point — at the low end — of those infected and also melts down the hospitals. What kind of economy do you think you're going to have under those conditions?"

Trump's idea that American can return to normal in 15 days "is a disastrous way to look at it," New York Times reporter Donald McNeil told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. Besides, America already has critical COVID-19 patients as young as 12, he said, so "this notion that it's only going to kill Grandma, as if that were okay, has got to stop."

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Given the potentially "catastrophic" economic toll, "it is entirely appropriate that a president calculate the costs and benefits of continuing to pursue extreme measures as sheltering in place," Daniel Drezner argues in The Washington Post. But because "this president is incapable of such calculation," the "crassest argument will be necessary to persuade Trump not to do what he is thinking of doing. Lifting emergency procedures will hurt Trump's voters more than anyone else, because they are more likely to listen to him and follow his lead. This means they are more likely to get infected and die before they can cast their ballots in November. That is a coldhearted thing to say. It also might be the only thing that stops Trump from killing more than half a million Americans."