Following is the text of Cornwall Alliance’s first “From the Stacks” livestream program with Founder and National Spokesman E. Calvin Beisner on Facebook, April 7, 2020. We post it here because Internet technical problems made some parts inaudible to viewers.

Today, let’s talk about the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19, and our governments’ responses to it. I’m going to argue that our governing authorities need to expand the sources from whom they seek advice about how to deal with this pandemic.

Until very recently, almost all the advice has come from the medical community, particularly doctors and scientists who specialize in dealing with epidemics or pandemics of infectious diseases—and that seems to make sense, granted that we’re dealing with an infectious disease. But I believe we need, increasingly, to hear from economists, particularly those who specialize in studying the increased mortality rates that come with major economic declines.

Unsurprisingly, many in the media and politics exaggerate COVID-19’s danger. Both have strong incentives to do so. The media incite fears to increase audience, which attracts advertisers, which pays bills. Hence the saying common among journalists, “Bad news is good news; good news is no news.” Politicians incite fears to lead people to think they’re doing great things to protect them, which garners votes.

Also unsurprisingly, some people understate the danger. Some do it because they suspect politicians are just acting on the principle, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” making every emergency a new reason to shrink liberty and expand government. Some do it because they’ve seen many claims of catastrophe come and go unfulfilled and suspect this is just another. Others do it because they simply feel confident that God is in control, but they neglect their own responsibility for prudent response.

What are faithful, wise Christians to do? How can we avoid both extremes, of over-reaction and under-reaction, of panic and complacency? How can we respond to this situation in terms of the two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbors?

In today’s litigious society, I should issue a little disclaimer here before I continue. I’m not a medical doctor, so if you’re looking for medical advice, ask your doctor. I’m also not a lawyer, so if you want legal advice about how to respond to governing officials’ orders, ask a lawyer. But I believe I can offer some godly wisdom.

I believe five Biblical principles can help us.

First, trust God.

Psalm 91:1–3 speaks directly to our situation: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.  I will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’ For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.” Indeed, all the rest of that psalm is relevant; I hope you’ll read it. Does it guarantee that no Christian will ever get sick? No. But it gives us reason to believe God is in control, and if He afflicts us with illness, it is only because that’s better for us than not. As Romans 8:28 says, “… for those who love God all things work together for good ….”

Second, don’t fear.

The most frequently repeated command in the Bible is “Do not be afraid,” or “Fear not.” Perhaps the best known is when God told Joshua, “Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9). When the disciples were in a boat battling a storm on the Sea of Galilee, they were afraid when they saw Jesus walking on the water, and He responded, “It is I; do not be afraid” (John 6:20). Why shouldn’t Joshua or the disciples have been afraid? In both instances, because God (in the disciples’ case, Jesus, God in the flesh) was with them. As God told Jeremiah, “Do not be afraid … for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:8).

Keeping things in perspective can reduce fear. COVID-19 is a serious risk, but we live with others every day. In the average year, over 37,000 Americans die of flu and over 38,000 in traffic accidents.

Even in the face of grave danger, Christians need not be afraid, for God is with us.

Third, submit, within limits, to governing authorities.

Even though I think some orders from our governments are excessive, and some perhaps even unconstitutional, Christians are bound by Scripture (Romans 13:1) to obey civil authorities unless they require us to disobey God. Hence we should, other than that exception, obey orders given as part of our legitimate government’s efforts to stop the spread of the Coronavirus.

One point about which some church leaders will want to think very carefully is whether they should obey orders for churches not to meet for worship. While such an order is a serious abridgment of religious liberty, protected in the First Amendment, would obeying it mean disobeying God? This is an issue on which Christian consciences differ and one that I won’t pretend to settle here. But one other thing we should be doing is considering how we might act, once this threat is behind us, to prevent government overreach in future emergencies.

Fourth, pray and work for revival, beginning with yourself and spreading through your church, your community, your nation, and the world.

2 Chronicles 7:13–14 says, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

Disease doesn’t always indicate God’s judgment—sometimes it has an entirely different purpose and implies a great compliment about someone’s integrity, as with Job. Yet God often sends disease as chastisement or punishment, whether on individuals, families, or whole nations. The universality of sin makes it certain that every person, every family, every church, every nation should be in continual repentance. If we forget that sometimes, we should be reminded of it in a time like this.

Hence we should spend time in serious prayer, searching our hearts, asking God to reveal the ways in which we sin against Him and to empower us by the Holy Spirit to change such ways. We should be praying for our neighbors, friends, and fellow citizens. And we should be sharing the gospel with others around us, and encouraging fellow believers to join us in spiritual exercises. We should pray for our governing officials.

If you’re staying home to help reduce the spread of the Coronavirus, you have more time available. Spend some of it in Bible reading and prayer, in using social media or the phone to encourage others and build your relationships with them. “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:8).

Fifth and finally, be prudent.

When Satan tempted Jesus to throw Himself down from the temple, he quoted Psalm 91:11–12: “He will command his angels concerning you” and “On their hands they will bear you up ….” If anyone could have claimed those verses as justification, Jesus could. But He didn’t. Instead He quoted another scripture: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7, quoting Deuteronomy 6:16).

Proverbs 22:3 says, “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” Apparently that’s a pretty important lesson, for it’s repeated, word-for-word, in Proverbs 27:12.

Our trust in God is no excuse for laziness, imprudence, or outright folly. Prudence, however, can be difficult. It requires attention not just to one danger but to many, including unintended consequences of our solutions. That’s what I call “prudent prudence.”

About 25 years ago, my doctor, after discovering I had a medical problem, advised against medication. He recommended a change in diet and exercise instead. He said something like this: “Cal, we medical doctors are trained to find a problem and fix it. We aren’t trained so much to think about new problems that our fix might create. It’s as if we told patients to back away from a hot stove without noticing the 500-foot cliff behind them.” He explained that the medication’s side effects could, in my case, be worse than the condition they treated.

If you’ve followed what the Cornwall Alliance says about climate change for long, you’ll recognize this as analogous to our warning that drastic attempts to reduce global warming by replacing abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels with diffuse, expensive, unreliable energy from wind and solar are likely to cause much greater harm than good.

I have a similar concern with how our federal, state, and local governments—and most other governments around the world—are responding to the Coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong. Some of the responses make perfect sense, like urging people

• to practice heightened personal hygiene, especially frequent and thorough handwashing with soap or sanitizer like Purell, and avoid touching our faces,
• to cover our mouths and noses with tissue when we cough or sneeze and dispose of the tissue in a covered wastebasket, or if we don’t have tissue handy, cough or sneeze into our elbows, not our hands,
• to minimize personal contact beyond our own families—and even within them if we know a family member has been infected—,
• to avoid large-group gatherings, and practice “social distancing” if we attend them (keeping at least 5 or 6 feet apart, not shaking hands or hugging),
• to stay home when sick so we don’t spread disease to others and overburden a healthcare system already stretched near its limits,
• to clean commonly touched surfaces—doorknobs, banisters, countertops, and the like—frequently with soap or sanitizing liquids,
• and to be especially careful to avoid situations in which we could pass on any infectious disease—Coronavirus or other—to especially vulnerable people, like the elderly and those with medical conditions like lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, or immune deficiencies.

Such actions can reduce the speed at which the virus spreads—“flatten the curve,” as we’ve all grown accustomed to hearing. That is important because although Coronavirus isn’t particularly deadly to most people (many infected show no symptoms, and most who do, only experience it as a bad cold or flu), very vulnerable people like those I’ve just described have high fatality rates. When they contract it, they’re likely to need high-level hospital care. Slowing the speed at which such cases occur means reducing the burden on medical professionals and making it less likely that we’ll run short of hospital beds, respirators, and other resources necessary to treat those infected.

Should churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples cease gathering for worship and prayer? That should be left up to their leaders, but with adequate precautions I think they can continue meeting. Worshipers can wear face masks—not so much to prevent their catching the virus, but, as many doctors have recommended, to help them not to touch their faces with their hands, which seems to be the primary way people get infected. They can make hand sanitizer readily available. They can clean frequently—and with disinfectant—doorknobs or bars, handrails, and other surfaces people often touch, have offerings placed in boxes rather than passing plates around, adopt methods of dispensing communion that avoid having many people touch the same objects, encourage families to sit together and others to sit at least 5 or 6 feet from each other, urge anyone who shows any symptoms of sickness to stay home, and so on.

Dr. Daniel Chin, a physician trained in epidemiology with 25 years of global public health experience, who in 2003 led much of WHO’s support to China to contain the SARS epidemic, provides very helpful guidance in an article in Christianity Today for churches trying to determine the appropriate level of response depending on the prevalence of the disease in their communities. If a church is in a community with no reported cases, he recommends that it maintain normal activities but step up public health practices and develop a plan for stronger action if cases arise in the community. If it’s in a community with some cases but only imported from another area or through contacts to an imported case, it should modify some activities, begin to implement a response plan, and communicate with members and local health officials. If it’s in a community with one or more cases without a known contact case and with multiple generations of transmission, it should modify and cancel some activities, fully implement its response plan, and communicate, and as nearby cases rise, cancel all but the most essential in-person activities and hold services online.

But I’m increasingly concerned that some other recommendations, or even orders, by our governments run the risk of pushing us over a cliff while warning us away from a hot stove.

What I have in mind are orders that many businesses, often called “non-essential” businesses, simply shut their doors, and that people stay inside their homes other than for essential purposes (like getting food or medical care).

As an aside, I must point out the terrible irony that in many states whose governors have ordered the closure of restaurants, other “non-essential” businesses, and churches, abortion clinics are allowed to continue their gruesome business, and cannabis dispensaries continue dispensing their brain-injuring product. Woe, the Scripture says, to those who call evil good and good evil.

But back to my thread. The more extreme policies, policies that have shut down so many businesses and required that most of America’s people stay at home, have already pushed unemployment in the United States up from about 3.5 percent to, according to former Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen, about 12 or 13 percent and rising. They’ve cost nearly 10 million jobs in just the last two weeks, and they will cost many more in weeks to come if such policies continue. Gone with those jobs are incomes for millions of people, causing increased poverty, which can pose even greater risks than COVID-19.

Now, please don’t protest, “But we’re talking about human lives here! They can’t be exchanged for wealth!” Right. But wealth can protect lives—and lost wealth can endanger them. Let me explain.

From February 12 to March 12, even before most of those measures were imposed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 8,351 points, or over $11.5 Trillion, and it lost another 1,012 points, or about another $1.3 Trillion, by the time I wrote this (noon March 17). Is that just losses to fat-cat stock investors? No. It’s losses to over 180 million Americans who own stock—many through their 401(k)s or IRAs, meant to provide for old age. It’s losses that could require businesses to lay off employees, leaving them without incomes to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and everything else they need—including health care if they contract the Coronavirus.

Let me draw an analogy here.

President Donald Trump began a March 18 press briefing by “announcing some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus” and repeatedly called the government’s response to the virus “war.” He invoked the Defense Production Act, designed to authorize the federal government to force companies to produce defense equipment in time of war.

Former Vice President Joe Biden said in the March 15 Democratic presidential primary debate, “We’re at war with a virus.” Many other politicians and business leaders around the world use similar language. In The New Republic, Adam Weinstein asks questions that expose (sometimes rightly) our government’s incompetence and failures in conducting this war.

But there’s another, more important angle to how to answer those questions.

In World War I, about 9.7 million military personnel and 10 million civilians died. In World War II, 20 million and 40 million. In both cases, civilian deaths outnumbered combatant deaths—in the first, by a slim margin, but in the second, they were double.

Might the “war on the Coronavirus” have similar results? That is, might “civilian” deaths outnumber “combatant” deaths in this, too? And what do “civilian” and “combatant” mean in this case?

Here I use “civilian” to mean someone who doesn’t get infected and “combatant” to mean someone who does. Might the “war on the Coronavirus” kill more people than the virus itself?

Up to now, reports have focused almost exclusively on modeled predictions and, along the way, actual counts of the number infected (“combatants”) and, of them, the number killed. There’s been little discussion of the number who will be killed not by the virus but by the war against it (“civilians”).

Estimating Deaths and Death Rates of “Combatants”

A widely influential model from Imperial College London, credited with prompting political leaders around the world to institute lockdowns, originally predicted over 500,000 deaths in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the United States. Later, in light of the United Kingdom’s initiating lockdowns, epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, its primary author, reduced the estimate for Britain by 96 percent or more, to under 20,000—over half of whom would have died this year anyway from combined age and (non-Coronavirus) illnesses (the difference between dying with the virus and dying from the virus). Ferguson did not issue a new estimate for the United States, which instituted similar measures, but by analogy it would have been around 88,000 instead of 2.2 million.

In terms of the counts, the numbers already infected appear to be vastly underestimated, probably by orders (note the plural) of magnitude (i.e., by 100 times or more), because most people infected show no or only mild symptoms and so are never tested.

But the numbers COVID-19 kills are probably overstated—perhaps not by orders of magnitude, but considerably nonetheless. In Italy, for instance, every death of someone infected is attributed to COVID-19, but “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity [pre-existing illness]—many had two or three,” according to Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to the Italian government. Again, it’s the difference between dying with the virus and dying from it.

Correcting for underestimates of infections and overestimates of deaths means the death rate from COVID-19 is even more highly exaggerated than the infection rate. If infections are 100 times higher while deaths caused by the virus are 88 percent lower, the combined error exaggerates the death rate (deaths per 100,000 infections) by 833 times.

Estimating Deaths of “Civilians”

Will the “war on the Coronavirus” kill more people than the virus itself? Most discussions so far have neglected that question. But it’s critically important.

How might we go about it? After all, no coroner is going to be able to write on a death certificate, “Cause of death: war on the Coronavirus.” Are we left entirely in the dark?

No. For decades economists have studied the relationship between total economic production and death rates in a given economy. Their studies have led to various estimates of the amount of economic loss that results in what they call a “statistical death.” Such deaths may be from despair-driven suicide (already mounting) and opioid abuse or reduced spending on health care, food, shelter, safe transportation, and other such life-enhancing goods.

Four representative studies (in 1994, by Randall Lutter and John F. Morrall III; 1997, by Ralph Keeney; 1999, by Lutter, Morrall, and W. Kip Viscusi; and 2017, by Viscusi and James Broughel) provide a variety of helpful estimates. The first three estimated “the income loss that induces one death … from a low of $10.0 million to a high of $23.3 million.” (Sometimes “income loss that induces one death” is confused with “willingness-to-spend” to prevent a death, but the two are not identical.)The last, happily, put the “cost-per-life-saved cutoff value at which regulations increase mortality risk” at from $82.3 to $130.0 million with a midpoint of $108.4 million. (All amounts adjusted for inflation.)

To avoid getting into an excessive number of scenarios, let’s apply the midpoint of the first three estimates, $16.5 million, and the midpoint of the last, $108.4 million.

To calculate how many the “war on the Coronavirus” will kill, we need to know how much it’s going to cost the U.S. economy. Again, estimates vary, and outcomes will depend heavily on decisions yet to be made by the President, governors, and mayors (and, if our federalism and separation of powers still mean anything, by Congress, state legislatures, and county and city councils, [and our courts when they hear cases in which plaintiffs claim government orders harm them and are unconstitutional]) around the country that will determine how many and for how long businesses remain closed or operating under capacity. But we can take a few examples from a news report and an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on March 21.

JPMorgan’s Bruce Kasman “expects U.S. gross domestic product will fall by 1.8% this year,” and “Before the outbreak, he had projected output to grow 1.5%.” That implies a combined difference of 3.3 percent between what could have been and what will be. Applied to 2019’s GDP of $21.4 trillion, that would mean a loss of $707 billion.

Joel Prakken, chief U.S. economist at IHS Markit, forecast a loss of $1.5 trillion in GDP for 2020, and Wall Street economist Ed Hyman predicted a loss of 20 percent of GDP, compared with a previously expected gain of 2 percent. Combining those implies a 22 percent difference, or $4.7 trillion.

Those estimates all predated the extension of the lockdown orders announced March 29, so each will need be adjusted upward after we know how long the shutdown continues, but they can serve for illustration.

If lost income that results in a statistical death is $108.4 million, then Kasman’s economic loss estimate entails 6,522 extra deaths; Prakken’s 13,838; and Hyman’s 43,358.

If instead it’s $16.5 million, then Kasman’s estimate entails 42,848 extra deaths; Prakken’s 90,909; and Hyman’s a staggering 284,848.

And remember: all of those economic loss estimates need to be adjusted upward because the nearly nationwide lockdowns have been extended by another two weeks—and may be extended even farther into the future.

Nobody really knows just how many people’s lives will be shortened, or by how much, by the extreme measures. I suspect they won’t be at the high end of the numbers I just gave you—but I’m also pretty sure they won’t be at the low end.

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald expressed just this concern when she wrote on March 13 in The New Criterion, “If the measures we undertake to protect a vulnerable few end up exposing them, along with the rest of society, to even more damaging risks—was it worth the cost? An example: there were 34,200 deaths in the United States during the 2018–19 influenza season, estimates the CDC. We did not shut down public events and institutions to try to slow the spread of the flu.” Her whole article is worth reading.

So I think it might be time for many Americans, including Christians, to start urging elected officials to back off of some of the more extreme measures so far imposed to stem the spread of the Coronavirus. Should school classes, sports events, concerts, etc., resume? I don’t know, but I suspect that in areas with few or no confirmed cases, they could resume with minor risk compared with other risks that we take for granted every day (like from flu, or traffic accidents—which killed 38,800 people in 2019). Should restaurants reopen? I think they could, safely, if they adopted enhanced hygiene practices, including using disinfectant to wash down tables and chairs between guests, requiring more frequent hand washing by servers and kitchen staff, placing hand sanitizer dispensers in many highly visible spots, requiring workers with COVID-19 symptoms, whether they’ve been tested yet or not, to stay home, and so on.

I’ll conclude by asking, “All That, and For What?” What will we have gained in exchange for the “civilian” deaths—the deaths of uninfected people—caused by the more extreme measures to contain COVID-19?

In justifying his drastic measures to slow the spread of the virus, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “I want to be able to say to the people of New York—I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”

I won’t. I’ll be furious. If all we do with trillions, or even billions, of dollars is save one life, we’ve done something very evil. Why? Because by doing something else with those same dollars we could have “saved” (really just prolonged—we all die sometime) thousands of other lives.

I don’t know—and no one knows—just how much our economy will lose due to the “war on the Coronavirus,” or how many deaths that loss will cause. Neither does anyone know yet how many deaths the virus itself will cause. Neither will we ever know just how many deaths from the virus the war prevents—because we’ll never know how many would have died without the war. (One thing it seems we can be confident of, though, is that all the various containment measures probably won’t reduce total infections or deaths by much—they’ll just spread them over a longer time.)

Nor will we ever know how many “civilian” deaths might be prevented by ending the war—or at least its more extreme, economy-killing aspects.

To argue otherwise, in every case, will be to commit the logical fallacy of hypothesis contrary to fact. We’ll never know what would have happened had what didn’t happen happened.

But it’s indisputable that the virus won’t be the only killer—and not even the only killer on a mass scale. The war will kill, too. Just as surely as in World Wars I and II, there will be some ratio of “combatant” to “civilian” deaths. I strongly suspect that in this war, too, “civilian” deaths will outnumber “combatant” deaths—whether by 3 percent as in World War I, or by 100 percent as in World War II, or by some other ratio.

So, What Will the “Civilian” Deaths in the War Against the Coronavirus Buy?

In the real wars, World War I and World War II, what did we gain in exchange for the civilian deaths? The preservation of limited, democratic government with liberty and the Rule of Law instead of totalitarian, dictatorial government with neither.

What about in the “war on the Coronavirus”? What will we gain? Certainly not the preservation of limited, democratic government. All the movement is in the opposite direction. Governments all over the world, including in the “land of the free, and the home of the brave,” are exerting control over their citizens that exceeds anything we’ve seen before outside the worst Communist, Nazi, and Fascist governments of the past—and maybe even worse.

Will we be able to regain our liberties, to force governments back within limits? I don’t know. Do you?

It’s time our elected leaders and appropriate scholars began paying as much attention to the threat of increased deaths from economic collapse, and to the threat of lost liberties, as to the virus. We need a prudent path between under-reaction and over-reaction. We’ll find one only as we widen our perspective beyond medicine and epidemiology and include economics and political philosophy as well.

Thank you for watching. Trust God. Fear not. Pray.

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash.