Analysis: Demonstrators are guided by desperation, math and Brad Pitt

Under the slogan "Reopen" it has been protested in Michigan, Wisconsin, California and in many other places in the United States. There have been far from any massive protests, and opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority in the United States supports the rules of shutdown and social distance.

But protesters stubbornly continue to show up on main streets and at state parliaments. It's no wonder. 26 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits in the last five weeks. This corresponds to 15 percent of the entire US workforce. In addition, many who applied have not been granted a grant. And many are still waiting for the $ 1,200 announced by the US President for the Americans to receive.

The situation simply becomes increasingly desperate for many, who are torn between helping to avoid more deaths and being able to support their families. Losing one's job in the United States also means losing one's health insurance and money to pay for schooling or kindergarten.

Here comes the math - and Brad Pitt.

In the movie The Big Short, about the winner and loser of the financial crisis, Brad Pitt plays a sacked bank shark who is investing heavily in the housing market in the US to collapse. A replica from the film is now being repeated by many who protest in the United States. "For every percent of unemployment that goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?"

The quote has come true for some protesters, but is that true?

Yes-ish.

There is an old 1981 study that describes how 37,000 people die for each percentage point increase in unemployment in the United States. That study focused on more long-term unemployment, when US jobs moved overseas, and has not taken into account how many deaths can be prevented through other types of measures, such as a check for $ 1,200.

But in the absence of recent well-known studies, the figure in The Big Short is now used when some have started to count and compare.

To date, over 50,000 Americans have died with covid-19. If unemployment increases by ten percentage points, which most analysts believe, it would, according to Brad Pitt's character, mean up to 400,000 dead in cardiac arrest, suicide and other.

With the - certainly lame - example of calculations, it is not difficult to understand the people who went out into the streets to protest. But they are a diverse crowd. It is from conservative groups, vaccination opponents and ordinary troubled Americans who protest.

But even though many of the demonstrators want the country to open significantly faster than President Donald Trump's guidelines to re-open the United States dictate, almost no one is protesting the president himself.

On the contrary, many Trump supporters have participated in the protests, which have instead targeted local governors around the United States.

In New York, with nearly 40 percent of all dead across the United States, Governor Andrew Cuomo ruled on a question whether the solution, that is, the shutdown, is worse than the problem.

"How can the cure be worse than the disease if the disease is potentially dead," the governor replied.