Are our leaders panicking us into a second Great Depression? Or are they taking the right steps to prevent mass casualties? We asked two commentators to trade arguments over email. Dear PEG, Word just came in that Montgomery County, Maryland, has closed all its tennis and pickleball courts. So if you come to visit, don’t bother packing your rackets or pickles or whatever the gear is, because pickleball is off. In DC, the tennis courts are still open. I know because freelance snoops – mostly middle-aged women – have taken to social media to inform the world whenever they spot a gang of suspicious characters in white shorts and headbands trying to sneak in a doubles match, making sure to tag the police, the parks department, and the mayor just in case they want to send a squad car. If these snitches were thinking rationally, they’d notice that tennis puts more than six feet between players (not sure about pickleball). But they’re not thinking rationally. Who is these days? It’s difficult to sort through the sandpile of numbers about this epidemic. Figures for “coronavirus deaths” are useless if they don’t distinguish between dying from and dying with. Case numbers might go up because the disease is spreading or because you’re testing more people. So I’m sticking with the one ungameable number: total fatalities. According to the useful website EuroMOMO.eu (European Monitoring of Excess Mortality), which collates all-cause mortality data for 23 countries, Italy has seen an increase in deaths in recent weeks, compared to previous years, but the spike is smaller than the one in 2016-17, the winter when it was so cold the Danube froze over. This is true even if you restrict it to those over 65, the age group that accounts for the overwhelming majority of coronavirus deaths. If we end up inducing a second Great Depression to avert a crisis that, in terms of fatalities, is comparable to a bad flu season, skeptics of the lockdown will feel justifiably vindicated. Which will be small consolation, since we’ll be poor like everybody else. Did you catch this morning’s unemployment numbers? Sincerely, Helen