For months, President Trump has predicted that deaths indirectly caused by stay-at-home orders would outweigh those caused by covid-19 itself. “You’re going to have suicides by the thousands,” he said in late March. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar offered a version of that argument in The Washington Post last month, as he backed the president’s case for reopening the economy: “The economic crisis brought on by the virus is a silent killer,” he wrote, one that “will likely cause tens of thousands of excess deaths” from suicides and opioid overdoses. Similarly, more than 600 physicians recently signed a letter — an effort organized by a conservative group — describing business closures as a “mass casualty incident” because of increased “alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack” and other effects.