4 ms·

The Covid-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life

26 points by mrfusion 6y ago

ciguy 6y ago
Can anyone explain how they calculate the years of life lost by primarily young people due to shutdown vs the years (or months) of life lost from the very elderly population due to covid? It seems to me that there is also a measure of quality to be taken into account where many of the deceased were in care homes and likely had a very low quality of life already. I am for protecting as much life as possible, economy be damned. But killing the economy seems much more likely to steal many more years of quality life from people than covid is given the current demographics. I'm genuinely curious if anyone has actually run the numbers and talked about this? Overall I feel like all we get are politically charged platitudes (On both sides) and politicians using this to advance their careers.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
This reminds me of the Bastiat essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen": http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
Retric 6y ago
I think the deaths are also going to cause millions of years lost life. Doing nothing would have cost 10’s if not 100’s of millions of years of lost life, so net win.
- glofish 6y ago
  The median age of the people deceased of COVID-19 is 82 The median life expectancy in the US is 79 years. The measures introduced to stop the disease kill the young and hence affect the loss of life far more.
  - dao- 6y ago
    > The measures introduced to stop the disease kill the young and hence affect the loss of life far more. Not in other countries. Fix your ridiculous social security system.
    - glofish 6y ago
      You have no idea what you talk about, you kill the young by failing to provide them with a functioning society. In all places on Earth, the same will be true to Norway as to Mexico. Of course Mexicans will die even more because at least Norway you won't die of hunger but you'll die younger of alcoholism and not having anything to do while cowering alone, afraid at home.
  - Retric 6y ago
    That’s already accounted for by using life years rather than total deaths. Also, the life expectancy in the US of an 82 year old woman is 9 years and 8 months and for men 8 years and 2 months. Half the deaths are from people younger than this, so on average total lost years per death is well over a decade. Globally deaths are ~450k at a minimum, meaning lost years are well into the millions with the pandemic still in full swing. PS: Calculating average life expectancy is tricky because it does not fall 1:1 with years lived.
maxerickson 6y ago
There doesn't seem to be any attempt to address the evidence that much of the economic impact is a direct result of the pandemic disease and not from government policy. I decided to stop visiting bars and restaurants before there was a stay home order here, and am not eagerly going back out now that the order has been relaxed.
- anbende 6y ago
  Thank you! Most people are not returning to business as usual. It’s not like the economy is going to just return to normal as cases skyrocket and people are dying.
  - Vysero 6y ago
    There are problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. You are a rare minority; the overwhelming majority of people don't want to be locked down nor are they afraid to be outside.
    - jaybeeayyy 6y ago
      I went to a barbershop and the owner was cutting hair because only 2 or 3 of the other barbers wanted to come back. I thought there would be a huge line or backlog but I was the only one in there and she said it's just been really hard to get people to feel safe to come back in. They're checking temperatures, requiring masks etc. but not enough have felt safe to go there. However, I also started going to the gym again and that has been jam packed with people. They roped off a lot of machines and areas to keep people distanced but it doesn't seem like that will help. Every time I've been I'm one of the two patrons that wears a mask. Other than staff, no one does. I don't think there's any clear cut statistics on this but people are definitely split on the issue of remaining quarantined/doing basic stuff and going back to business as usual.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Age and heath is a huge factor in people’s perceived and actual risks. A fit and healthy 25 year old going to the gym regularly is at something like 1% the risk of the average 90 year old. On top the tendency of young people to think themselves invincible and you get wildly different responses from different age groups. PS: Over 33% of US deaths are from people over 85, 1% are from people under 35.
mewpmewp2 6y ago
I've been always talking about this side of the debate, but nobody wants to consider this, as if it was completely taboo topic to discuss.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It's been loudly discussed on pretty much every article posted here since government orders started to be issued.
- standardUser 6y ago
  It's taboo because that "side" of the debate calls for millions of avoidable deaths.
  - robotron 6y ago
    Yes and look at which comment actually gets downvoted. Yours. Looks to me it's more taboo to be in favor of trying to slow the spread and acceptable to be selfish instead.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  That's a victim mentality. It's discussed all the time - the argument is constantly being had as to what the consequences of both the shutdown and the disease are, and at what combination of policy and time the two become comparable. Just because you encounter a lot of people who argue that we have not yet reached that point, doesn't mean the entire topic is taboo or that you alone are willing to consider something that nobody else is.
  - mewpmewp2 6y ago
    "Nobody" was maybe too strong word, but this topic definitely is not liked by a lot of people. And it's better in HackerNews, but in Reddit i.e. you get downvoted for trying to calculate results of that.
- glofish 6y ago
  It is because most people think they are next in line, same idea as with police unions resisting change and defending their worst. If you think you are next then you draw the line so far out that you feel safe.
jliptzin 6y ago
Maybe give people a basic income and they won’t kill themselves when they lose their job?
- xienze 6y ago
  They're already getting a "basic income" of $2400 per month on top of whatever normal unemployment benefits are available...
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
The virus itself has already cost ~a million years of life just in terms of the accounted-for deaths, and combining that with the idea that the typical sufferer would have lived about ten more years (I don't have a citation, but I saw news to this effect a few weeks ago). And that's with an national infection rate of between one and five percent. I also just want to point out that public policy is only one of the forces that is slowing down economic activity. Even if the government were willing to shove its fingers in its ears and say "lah lah lah," people would eventually begin to fear for their lives and we would see significant economic contraction based on individual, uncoordinated mitigation (along with severely elevated excess deaths from the virus). I just also want to point out that losing ~1% of the national population to the virus would not be without contractionary effects, since 1% of the population is also 1% of the consumers, by definition. It's questionable whether this cost benefit analysis has actually addressed the benefits of the shutdown based on a complete modeling of what would have happened without it.
- glofish 6y ago
  No one says that the government should pretend everything is all right. It is about what policies you take. Should the mayor weld shut the entrance to a park to "protect" the people?
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    I'm all for the idea of more targeted mitigations. In hindsight, the play we should have made is obvious. The moment is became clear that a highly contagious virus was happening in China, we ought to have closed all borders, shut down, instituted mandatory quarantine (including for repatriating Americans), and eradicated the virus, keeping numbers at zero. We could have reopened and at least had a working domestic economy, like Mongolia or New Zealand. However, I don't think anyone has yet demonstrated working policy stances that effectively mitigate the spread of the virus and are materially different from what we're doing now. I've heard plenty of folks articulate the idea that such policies are possible, but I don't think we know enough about the virus to really be confident that they would work.
throwaway4666 6y ago
This is such a typical economist thinkpiece, attempting to compute stuff that doesn't exist and drawing wild extrapolations or equivalences so you can put a number, any number, on something. Seriously, look at this paragraph: >Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown. Only in the mind of an economist does this make a shred of sense. Normal people just shake their head and go "wtf, people's lives aren't equal to virtual money that failed to exist". Actually rigorous people shake their head and go "wait, these statistical associations are just correlations and not necessarily transitive, so every time you translate money into outcomes you end up taking intellectual shortcuts that add up until you're spouting nonsense". You need to lack both sensitivity and rigor to put numbers on things like that, a quintessential property of libertarian economists.
- Vysero 6y ago
  I am going to have to agree here. At best it's a terrible estimation and at worst it's utter nonsense. That being said, we didn't have to shut down the global economy to deal with this crisis.
- mewpmewp2 6y ago
  Lockdown definitely causes deaths. But how many? I think to see that one would just have to view the big picture and understand how everything is related together. Are you suggesting one should not try to calculate this at all? Or are you suggesting that it's 0 deaths so there's no need to calculate it.
justin66 6y ago
When an article starts out with a blatant lie, there's not much point in reading past that that: Our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focuses on containing the spread of the disease at all costs, instead of “flattening the curve” and preventing hospital overcrowding. Literally no one who designed, implemented, or took part in our lockdowns - or wandered past a newspaper or television in the last four months - would claim that we've been "focused on containing the spread of the disease at all costs."
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  It's quite beside the point what anyone claims. The claim you're objecting to is about the lockdown policy, not claims about the lockdown policy. More specifically: its substance and impact, not the rhetoric or stated intentions around it.
  - justin66 6y ago
    I stand by my statement when an article starts out with a blatant lie, there's not much point in reading past that. If you think the opposite is true, I guess that's an entertaining thought. It's probably applicable to satire (which actually raises a question about your post, but nevermind). > The claim you're objecting to is about the lockdown policy, not claims about the lockdown policy. Right. It's saying something blatantly false about the lockdown policy. You seem to have been confused by my second sentence, so allow me to elaborate. A person would literally need to be living on a Pacific island alongside the old Japanese guy who nobody told the war was over and would need to have had no direct contact with the lockdown policy, human beings living under the lockdown policy, or indirect contact with the policy via reading about it or watching news about it in the media, in order to believe the claim made in the first sentence that the policy was about "containing the spread of the disease at all costs."
    - bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
      > when an article starts out with a blatant lie, there's not much point in reading past that. That's interesting, elaborate on that some more.
tomhoward 6y ago
Note this was published over three weeks ago – 05/25/20. A long time for such a fast-changing situation.
xxpor 6y ago
In the US we've decided to take the worst approach possible. The economy's been blown up while we're not actually getting the disease under control. Places like Taiwan and New Zealand are basically entirely reopened outside of international travel. Here you have these deliberately evil governors not allowing local officials to impose wearing masks in public despite evidence that they're making a huge difference. Florida's seeing thousands of new cases a day. Yet they're still "reopening", so you have a ton of disease spread, while a lot of folks don't actually want to go anywhere and participate in the economy. So it just ends up prolonging the pain. Meanwhile, theres absolutely no leadership from the Feds, besides using it as excuse to waive basically all environmental regulations so corporations can poison the water supply.
purplezooey 6y ago
A few of the authors are fellows at the Hoover Institution... enough said.
ykevinator 6y ago
Anti vaxers

26 points by mrfusion 6y ago

Can anyone explain how they calculate the years of life lost by primarily young people due to shutdown vs the years (or months) of life lost from the very elderly population due to covid? It seems to me that there is also a measure of quality to be taken into account where many of the deceased were in care homes and likely had a very low quality of life already. I am for protecting as much life as possible, economy be damned. But killing the economy seems much more likely to steal many more years of quality life from people than covid is given the current demographics. I'm genuinely curious if anyone has actually run the numbers and talked about this? Overall I feel like all we get are politically charged platitudes (On both sides) and politicians using this to advance their careers.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

This reminds me of the Bastiat essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen": http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

Retric 6y ago

I think the deaths are also going to cause millions of years lost life. Doing nothing would have cost 10’s if not 100’s of millions of years of lost life, so net win.

glofish 6y ago
The median age of the people deceased of COVID-19 is 82 The median life expectancy in the US is 79 years. The measures introduced to stop the disease kill the young and hence affect the loss of life far more.
- dao- 6y ago
  > The measures introduced to stop the disease kill the young and hence affect the loss of life far more. Not in other countries. Fix your ridiculous social security system.
  - glofish 6y ago
    You have no idea what you talk about, you kill the young by failing to provide them with a functioning society. In all places on Earth, the same will be true to Norway as to Mexico. Of course Mexicans will die even more because at least Norway you won't die of hunger but you'll die younger of alcoholism and not having anything to do while cowering alone, afraid at home.
- Retric 6y ago
  That’s already accounted for by using life years rather than total deaths. Also, the life expectancy in the US of an 82 year old woman is 9 years and 8 months and for men 8 years and 2 months. Half the deaths are from people younger than this, so on average total lost years per death is well over a decade. Globally deaths are ~450k at a minimum, meaning lost years are well into the millions with the pandemic still in full swing. PS: Calculating average life expectancy is tricky because it does not fall 1:1 with years lived.

maxerickson 6y ago

There doesn't seem to be any attempt to address the evidence that much of the economic impact is a direct result of the pandemic disease and not from government policy. I decided to stop visiting bars and restaurants before there was a stay home order here, and am not eagerly going back out now that the order has been relaxed.

anbende 6y ago
Thank you! Most people are not returning to business as usual. It’s not like the economy is going to just return to normal as cases skyrocket and people are dying.
- Vysero 6y ago
  There are problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. You are a rare minority; the overwhelming majority of people don't want to be locked down nor are they afraid to be outside.
  - jaybeeayyy 6y ago
    I went to a barbershop and the owner was cutting hair because only 2 or 3 of the other barbers wanted to come back. I thought there would be a huge line or backlog but I was the only one in there and she said it's just been really hard to get people to feel safe to come back in. They're checking temperatures, requiring masks etc. but not enough have felt safe to go there. However, I also started going to the gym again and that has been jam packed with people. They roped off a lot of machines and areas to keep people distanced but it doesn't seem like that will help. Every time I've been I'm one of the two patrons that wears a mask. Other than staff, no one does. I don't think there's any clear cut statistics on this but people are definitely split on the issue of remaining quarantined/doing basic stuff and going back to business as usual.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Age and heath is a huge factor in people’s perceived and actual risks. A fit and healthy 25 year old going to the gym regularly is at something like 1% the risk of the average 90 year old. On top the tendency of young people to think themselves invincible and you get wildly different responses from different age groups. PS: Over 33% of US deaths are from people over 85, 1% are from people under 35.

mewpmewp2 6y ago

I've been always talking about this side of the debate, but nobody wants to consider this, as if it was completely taboo topic to discuss.

maxerickson 6y ago
It's been loudly discussed on pretty much every article posted here since government orders started to be issued.
standardUser 6y ago
It's taboo because that "side" of the debate calls for millions of avoidable deaths.
- robotron 6y ago
  Yes and look at which comment actually gets downvoted. Yours. Looks to me it's more taboo to be in favor of trying to slow the spread and acceptable to be selfish instead.
happytoexplain 6y ago
That's a victim mentality. It's discussed all the time - the argument is constantly being had as to what the consequences of both the shutdown and the disease are, and at what combination of policy and time the two become comparable. Just because you encounter a lot of people who argue that we have not yet reached that point, doesn't mean the entire topic is taboo or that you alone are willing to consider something that nobody else is.
- mewpmewp2 6y ago
  "Nobody" was maybe too strong word, but this topic definitely is not liked by a lot of people. And it's better in HackerNews, but in Reddit i.e. you get downvoted for trying to calculate results of that.
glofish 6y ago
It is because most people think they are next in line, same idea as with police unions resisting change and defending their worst. If you think you are next then you draw the line so far out that you feel safe.

jliptzin 6y ago

Maybe give people a basic income and they won’t kill themselves when they lose their job?

xienze 6y ago
They're already getting a "basic income" of $2400 per month on top of whatever normal unemployment benefits are available...

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

The virus itself has already cost ~a million years of life just in terms of the accounted-for deaths, and combining that with the idea that the typical sufferer would have lived about ten more years (I don't have a citation, but I saw news to this effect a few weeks ago). And that's with an national infection rate of between one and five percent. I also just want to point out that public policy is only one of the forces that is slowing down economic activity. Even if the government were willing to shove its fingers in its ears and say "lah lah lah," people would eventually begin to fear for their lives and we would see significant economic contraction based on individual, uncoordinated mitigation (along with severely elevated excess deaths from the virus). I just also want to point out that losing ~1% of the national population to the virus would not be without contractionary effects, since 1% of the population is also 1% of the consumers, by definition. It's questionable whether this cost benefit analysis has actually addressed the benefits of the shutdown based on a complete modeling of what would have happened without it.

glofish 6y ago
No one says that the government should pretend everything is all right. It is about what policies you take. Should the mayor weld shut the entrance to a park to "protect" the people?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I'm all for the idea of more targeted mitigations. In hindsight, the play we should have made is obvious. The moment is became clear that a highly contagious virus was happening in China, we ought to have closed all borders, shut down, instituted mandatory quarantine (including for repatriating Americans), and eradicated the virus, keeping numbers at zero. We could have reopened and at least had a working domestic economy, like Mongolia or New Zealand. However, I don't think anyone has yet demonstrated working policy stances that effectively mitigate the spread of the virus and are materially different from what we're doing now. I've heard plenty of folks articulate the idea that such policies are possible, but I don't think we know enough about the virus to really be confident that they would work.

throwaway4666 6y ago

This is such a typical economist thinkpiece, attempting to compute stuff that doesn't exist and drawing wild extrapolations or equivalences so you can put a number, any number, on something. Seriously, look at this paragraph: >Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown. Only in the mind of an economist does this make a shred of sense. Normal people just shake their head and go "wtf, people's lives aren't equal to virtual money that failed to exist". Actually rigorous people shake their head and go "wait, these statistical associations are just correlations and not necessarily transitive, so every time you translate money into outcomes you end up taking intellectual shortcuts that add up until you're spouting nonsense". You need to lack both sensitivity and rigor to put numbers on things like that, a quintessential property of libertarian economists.

Vysero 6y ago
I am going to have to agree here. At best it's a terrible estimation and at worst it's utter nonsense. That being said, we didn't have to shut down the global economy to deal with this crisis.
mewpmewp2 6y ago
Lockdown definitely causes deaths. But how many? I think to see that one would just have to view the big picture and understand how everything is related together. Are you suggesting one should not try to calculate this at all? Or are you suggesting that it's 0 deaths so there's no need to calculate it.

justin66 6y ago

When an article starts out with a blatant lie, there's not much point in reading past that that: Our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focuses on containing the spread of the disease at all costs, instead of “flattening the curve” and preventing hospital overcrowding. Literally no one who designed, implemented, or took part in our lockdowns - or wandered past a newspaper or television in the last four months - would claim that we've been "focused on containing the spread of the disease at all costs."

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
It's quite beside the point what anyone claims. The claim you're objecting to is about the lockdown policy, not claims about the lockdown policy. More specifically: its substance and impact, not the rhetoric or stated intentions around it.
- justin66 6y ago
  I stand by my statement when an article starts out with a blatant lie, there's not much point in reading past that. If you think the opposite is true, I guess that's an entertaining thought. It's probably applicable to satire (which actually raises a question about your post, but nevermind). > The claim you're objecting to is about the lockdown policy, not claims about the lockdown policy. Right. It's saying something blatantly false about the lockdown policy. You seem to have been confused by my second sentence, so allow me to elaborate. A person would literally need to be living on a Pacific island alongside the old Japanese guy who nobody told the war was over and would need to have had no direct contact with the lockdown policy, human beings living under the lockdown policy, or indirect contact with the policy via reading about it or watching news about it in the media, in order to believe the claim made in the first sentence that the policy was about "containing the spread of the disease at all costs."
  - bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
    > when an article starts out with a blatant lie, there's not much point in reading past that. That's interesting, elaborate on that some more.

tomhoward 6y ago

Note this was published over three weeks ago – 05/25/20. A long time for such a fast-changing situation.

xxpor 6y ago

In the US we've decided to take the worst approach possible. The economy's been blown up while we're not actually getting the disease under control. Places like Taiwan and New Zealand are basically entirely reopened outside of international travel. Here you have these deliberately evil governors not allowing local officials to impose wearing masks in public despite evidence that they're making a huge difference. Florida's seeing thousands of new cases a day. Yet they're still "reopening", so you have a ton of disease spread, while a lot of folks don't actually want to go anywhere and participate in the economy. So it just ends up prolonging the pain. Meanwhile, theres absolutely no leadership from the Feds, besides using it as excuse to waive basically all environmental regulations so corporations can poison the water supply.

purplezooey 6y ago

A few of the authors are fellows at the Hoover Institution... enough said.

ykevinator 6y ago

Anti vaxers