Nope, the setup doesn’t cover the variables. A more accurate comparison would have been, “what’s worse, 250.000 dead or 35 million impoverished. And given the national priority to stop this exploding epidemic the government needs to and can make the people who lost jobs and income whole. The last sentence is just hyperbole. No government is trying to lock citizens in their homes for years. Plans abound to reopen the economy with relative safety, some of them will work.