Opinion: Don’t use ‘deaths of despair’ as rationale for reopening the country too soon
Following congressional testimony last week about frontline workers’ experiences during the Covid-19 epidemic, members of the U.S. House of Representatives raised the specter of a rise in “deaths of despair” due to Covid-19 shutdowns. They implied that the country had a moral obligation to reopen quickly, if only to avoid current and future deaths from suicide, homicide, opioids, and alcohol.
A comment by a trauma physician in California that his hospital had seen “a year’s worth of suicide attempts in four weeks” went viral this week, picked up by Fox News and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway to support the argument to reopen the country, even though the remark was incorrect and there’s been no rise in suicide deaths in his county this year.
