The New York Times recently published a report detailing how the coronavirus pandemic is expected to worsen food insecurity in impoverished regions around the world, adding to a growing repository of evidence demonstrating that, as Washington Examiner contributor Daniel Hannan has said, the virus has caused immense “damage to the living.”

For months, elected officials have debated the merits of various policies, with some arguing for a quicker reopening of the economy and others arguing for maintaining closures or other strict measures, setting up a sort of binary choice: Should we govern to save lives from the virus or to save the economy?