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> "It's entirely fair to conclude" does not mesh with "Time will tell whether this was the right approach". It doesn't mesh because you're omitting, "...could

> "It's entirely fair to conclude" does not mesh with "Time will tell whether this was the right approach". It doesn't mesh because you're omitting, "...could have led to substantially less economic loss". It won't be years before good conclusions can be drawn. Some states are already reporting that cases have already gone past their peak. Most countries that had outbreaks in March are seeing rates of cases going down. We'll probably be able to have a good idea of the scope of this pandemic by the end of summer. The economic harm is not hallucinatory. What is hallucinatory about 3 million people out of work in the span of a few weeks? You write that these people can go back to work when the crisis is over, but that is not true. If your employer goes out of business, or has too few customers to sustain as many employees, people are going to have to find new jobs. You also write about the loss of productivity in terms of the people who died due to the virus. That is something to account for, but the bulk of the virus' victims are not of working age. Whether or not you're comfortable with valuing human live does not alter the fact that we put value on life all the time. Whether it's deciding insurance payouts, worker's compensation, or healthcare spending we're constantly expressing the value of lives in dollar terms. Current predictions put the economic impact per life saved by social distancing at ~$190 million. Even if we assume that social distancing is only responsible for half the economic downturn, we're still talking about nearly $100M per death averted. Saying that this is excessive, and concluding that restrictions were excessive is entirely fair. How much money would a state funded healthcare system spend on its worst case patients? A lot less than $100 million.

thedufer 7y ago
> Current predictions put the economic impact per life saved by social distancing at ~$190 million. That sounds, on the face of it, implausibly high. To run some numbers - estimates of how much of the population would be infected without countermeasures run 40-70%, and death rates run 1-2% (this would be much worse if hospitals were overrun by an estimated 8 million ICU patients over a few months, but we'll use very conservative numbers). The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months?
- manfredo 7y ago
  The death rates so far have been dropping considerably once further testing becomes available. Right now, most tests are being performed in response to patients presenting symptoms. This creates artificially high results. The majority of COVID-19 infections do not result in symptoms, and these people would likely never be reported. Nor would a significant portion of people who did present flu-like symptoms but did not need medical care. Italy and Denmark have initiated random testing have revised death rates to be far lower, less than once percent. Random testings substantially increases the denominator, since it captures the vast majority of people who did not have serious symptoms. The infected cruise ship had a death rate of 0.7%, which is even more surprising giving the older average age of cruise passengers. The fact that places are reporting higher death rates than a population disproportionately older should have raised eyebrows. Again, the data itself is not suspect it's failing to account for the selection bias it imposes. But this does result in some very skewed conclusions on your end: > The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months? 1.3 million deaths is an order of magnitude more than what is being projected. Earlier this month, the range given was 100,000 - 240,000. Now this projection has been lowered first to 80,000 and now to 60,000: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-coronavirus-wednesday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-coronavirus-wednesd... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/09/coronavirus-deaths-u-s-could-closer-60-k-new-model-shows/5122467002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/0... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fauci-says-u-s-virus-deaths-may-be-60-000-halving-projections https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fauci-say...
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Yes, those projections are that low precisely because the strict social distancing is worsening, and we are managing to keep things within the capacity of the healthcare system. Reopen everything immediately and you'd see the death toll shoot right back up into the previously estimated, much higher ranges.
nullc 7y ago
It looks to me like you are incorrectly believing that I am making an argument that attaches intrinsic value to human lives. I am not. If we assume humans are slabs of talking meat which are worthless except for their economic properties (productivity and consumption), it is still not a likely economic win to let enormous numbers of them die because the economy is made of people. If you kill the people you kill the economy directly-- and, of course, people aren't going to continue like normal while others are dying around them regardless of what state policy is. So you are making a false comparison of the economic cost, the alternative is not "do nothing, let millions of innocent people die, and have the economy continue as if nothing happened". That isn't a possible alternative-- the economy couldn't continue as if nothing had happened if millions have died or are dying. Imagine for a moment, for the purpose of discussion, that we didn't need to keep food, medical supplies, power, etc flowing during the intervention. In that silly and unrealistic hypothetical it would be reasonable to pause the economy-- basically say "okay, for the next year all contracts are paused, all transfer of value prohibited, and in a year we just start 2020 over again for all legal and contractual purposes". Just like weekends are often disregarded in contracts but at a massive scale. No businesses would fail, nothing would change (except the people that died along the way). It's not possible to actually do this fanciful thing, because, unfortunately, we still need to keep utilities, food, medical services, etc. running and because everything is interconnected you can't just pause everything else. But if we could it would be a completely reasonable response. To the extent that, e.g. businesses fail due to this is a failure of our imagination and political will. Other than the small amount of actual damage done from spoiled goods (and deaths from the pandemic)-- all other economic consequences are a product of our beliefs and actions, and are not actual unavoidable losses in the same way that a death is. The stimulus is just one (half-assed) example of the potential ways that we can act to mitigate the direct economic harms while still protecting lives. Of course, I do also think that people's lives have tremendous intrinsic value, but that isn't part of my argument here. Instead, I was attempting to argue that even a dispassionate spherical economist murder bot should-- if it were behaving rationally-- respect that the irrecoverable loss of many human lives is something of tremendous economic significance because of the central role of as agents and targets of all economic activity. You're also disregarding the potential economic benefits of this disruption. Causing weak businesses to fail can be economically beneficial in the long run, as might the radical increase in telecommuting and video conferencing, or the development of more pandemic robust services (e.g. will we finally see automated grocery stores become a thing?) or the numerous other ways that this event might help the economy escape other local minima.

thedufer 7y ago

> Current predictions put the economic impact per life saved by social distancing at ~$190 million. That sounds, on the face of it, implausibly high. To run some numbers - estimates of how much of the population would be infected without countermeasures run 40-70%, and death rates run 1-2% (this would be much worse if hospitals were overrun by an estimated 8 million ICU patients over a few months, but we'll use very conservative numbers). The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months?

manfredo 7y ago
The death rates so far have been dropping considerably once further testing becomes available. Right now, most tests are being performed in response to patients presenting symptoms. This creates artificially high results. The majority of COVID-19 infections do not result in symptoms, and these people would likely never be reported. Nor would a significant portion of people who did present flu-like symptoms but did not need medical care. Italy and Denmark have initiated random testing have revised death rates to be far lower, less than once percent. Random testings substantially increases the denominator, since it captures the vast majority of people who did not have serious symptoms. The infected cruise ship had a death rate of 0.7%, which is even more surprising giving the older average age of cruise passengers. The fact that places are reporting higher death rates than a population disproportionately older should have raised eyebrows. Again, the data itself is not suspect it's failing to account for the selection bias it imposes. But this does result in some very skewed conclusions on your end: > The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months? 1.3 million deaths is an order of magnitude more than what is being projected. Earlier this month, the range given was 100,000 - 240,000. Now this projection has been lowered first to 80,000 and now to 60,000: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-coronavirus-wednesday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-coronavirus-wednesd... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/09/coronavirus-deaths-u-s-could-closer-60-k-new-model-shows/5122467002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/0... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fauci-says-u-s-virus-deaths-may-be-60-000-halving-projections https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fauci-say...
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Yes, those projections are that low precisely because the strict social distancing is worsening, and we are managing to keep things within the capacity of the healthcare system. Reopen everything immediately and you'd see the death toll shoot right back up into the previously estimated, much higher ranges.

nullc 7y ago

It looks to me like you are incorrectly believing that I am making an argument that attaches intrinsic value to human lives. I am not. If we assume humans are slabs of talking meat which are worthless except for their economic properties (productivity and consumption), it is still not a likely economic win to let enormous numbers of them die because the economy is made of people. If you kill the people you kill the economy directly-- and, of course, people aren't going to continue like normal while others are dying around them regardless of what state policy is. So you are making a false comparison of the economic cost, the alternative is not "do nothing, let millions of innocent people die, and have the economy continue as if nothing happened". That isn't a possible alternative-- the economy couldn't continue as if nothing had happened if millions have died or are dying. Imagine for a moment, for the purpose of discussion, that we didn't need to keep food, medical supplies, power, etc flowing during the intervention. In that silly and unrealistic hypothetical it would be reasonable to pause the economy-- basically say "okay, for the next year all contracts are paused, all transfer of value prohibited, and in a year we just start 2020 over again for all legal and contractual purposes". Just like weekends are often disregarded in contracts but at a massive scale. No businesses would fail, nothing would change (except the people that died along the way). It's not possible to actually do this fanciful thing, because, unfortunately, we still need to keep utilities, food, medical services, etc. running and because everything is interconnected you can't just pause everything else. But if we could it would be a completely reasonable response. To the extent that, e.g. businesses fail due to this is a failure of our imagination and political will. Other than the small amount of actual damage done from spoiled goods (and deaths from the pandemic)-- all other economic consequences are a product of our beliefs and actions, and are not actual unavoidable losses in the same way that a death is. The stimulus is just one (half-assed) example of the potential ways that we can act to mitigate the direct economic harms while still protecting lives. Of course, I do also think that people's lives have tremendous intrinsic value, but that isn't part of my argument here. Instead, I was attempting to argue that even a dispassionate spherical economist murder bot should-- if it were behaving rationally-- respect that the irrecoverable loss of many human lives is something of tremendous economic significance because of the central role of as agents and targets of all economic activity. You're also disregarding the potential economic benefits of this disruption. Causing weak businesses to fail can be economically beneficial in the long run, as might the radical increase in telecommuting and video conferencing, or the development of more pandemic robust services (e.g. will we finally see automated grocery stores become a thing?) or the numerous other ways that this event might help the economy escape other local minima.