There are two different angles on this question. One is whether the level of response in EA has been appropriate, the second is whether the level of response outside of EA (i.e., by society at large) has been appropriate.
I really don’t know about the first one. People outside of EA radically underestimate the scale of ongoing moral catastrophes, but once you take those into account, it’s not clear to me how to compare—as one example—the suffering produced by factory farming to the suffering produced by a bad response to coronavirus in developed countries (replace “suffering” with “negative effects” or something else if “suffering” isn’t the locus of your moral concern). My guess is many of the best EA causes should still be the primary focus of EAs, as non-EAs are counterfactually unlikely to be motivated by them. I do think, however, that at the very beginning of the coronavirus timeline (January to early March), the massive EA focus on coronavirus was by-and-large appropriate, given how nonchalant most of society seemed to be about the coronavirus.
Now for the second one—has the response of society been appropriate? I’m also under-informed here, but my very unoriginal answer is that the response to the coronavirus has been appropriate if you consider it proportional, not to the deadliness of the disease, but to (1) the infectivity of the disease (2) the corresponding inability of the healthcare system to handle a lot of infections. You wrote:
I read the news, too, but there’s something about the level of response to coronavirus given the very moderate deadliness— especially within EA— that just does not add up to me.
And it seems like you’re probably not accounting for (1) and (2). It does not seem like a particularly deadly disease (when compared to other, more dangerous pathogens), but it is very easily spread, which is where the worry comes from.
There are two different angles on this question. One is whether the level of response in EA has been appropriate, the second is whether the level of response outside of EA (i.e., by society at large) has been appropriate.
I really don’t know about the first one. People outside of EA radically underestimate the scale of ongoing moral catastrophes, but once you take those into account, it’s not clear to me how to compare—as one example—the suffering produced by factory farming to the suffering produced by a bad response to coronavirus in developed countries (replace “suffering” with “negative effects” or something else if “suffering” isn’t the locus of your moral concern). My guess is many of the best EA causes should still be the primary focus of EAs, as non-EAs are counterfactually unlikely to be motivated by them. I do think, however, that at the very beginning of the coronavirus timeline (January to early March), the massive EA focus on coronavirus was by-and-large appropriate, given how nonchalant most of society seemed to be about the coronavirus.
Now for the second one—has the response of society been appropriate? I’m also under-informed here, but my very unoriginal answer is that the response to the coronavirus has been appropriate if you consider it proportional, not to the deadliness of the disease, but to (1) the infectivity of the disease (2) the corresponding inability of the healthcare system to handle a lot of infections. You wrote:
And it seems like you’re probably not accounting for (1) and (2). It does not seem like a particularly deadly disease (when compared to other, more dangerous pathogens), but it is very easily spread, which is where the worry comes from.
I’m curious about people’s evaluations of (2)— how long would that go on? How bad would it really be compared to the losses from shutdown?