First off, I wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful response. Second, I wanted to clarify my position in light of your last line.

>And even, even, if you don't like being alive in a poorer world, and wish you had died of COVID-19 instead, you can still suicide then, it isn't either-or. But you can't go the other way, regret dying of COVID-19 and then choose to try the alternative problems instead.

I am in no way concerned about the outcome for myself of my immediate family. We are extremely low risk, have secure income, and savings in cash. I fully expect we will come out of this event better than we went in. In fact, the harder the crash, the better off we will likely be. That said, there are billions (literally) of people on this planet which were struggling and often failing to meet their basic health and nutritional needs. We should be mind be mindful of how our response will impact them.

On to the rest of your comments, I see two main points. please let me know if I misstated them.

1) Covid deaths today are irreversible, future deaths can be mitigated

I agree with this in principle, but in practice I am much more pessimistic that societies will mitigate the 2nd order effects of our response. People are notably bad at balancing highly visible costs today, with less visible and costs in the future. Societies could have come together with radical mitigations to reduce deaths from the 2009 global recession or any of the famines in recent decades[1], but they didn't because they were far away and not obvious.

If I were to summarize my main point, it is that we need to have the right stakeholders considering the long and short term perspective crafting our response to this pandemic, and economic considerations are a valid part of minimizing the overall death toll. Doctors have moral obligation to look out for the best interests of their patients and do not take economic considerations into account, nor should they. We don't want them to decide if the cost of a cancer medication could be better spent feeding the poor, but that doesn't mean the tradeoff doesn't exist.

When deciding how to manage this epidemic, doctors, economists, actuaries, and politicians all need to be involved in crafting the response. In order to minimize the death toll, you need to make accurate predictions of outcome and human behavior. Over-optimism or over-pessimism will lead to more deaths.

2) Existing food waste can be repurposed to feed the poor.

I wholeheartedly agree that food scarcity issues are still going to be about resource distribution and logistics. There will not be widespread famine in the US or UK, but there could be in poor food importing countries sub-Saharan Africa or parts of Asia. Plants will grow and food will be still produced in other countries, but if their economies tank, they will not have the money to buy it.

3) Solving these problems later is easier than raising the dead.

It all depends on how likely you think the solutions are and the death toll for each. If you risk 2 people tomorrow to save 1 more today, your solutions needs to be 50-50 to break even. There is obviously a point where this tradeoff results in more lost lives unless you believe you must always act to save every person you can today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines