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If the virus hasn't been stopped completely all you are doing are dragging feet indefinitely (with all the catastrophical damage that comes along with it). It

If the virus hasn't been stopped completely all you are doing are dragging feet indefinitely (with all the catastrophical damage that comes along with it). It hasn't worked - literally nothing had qualitatively changed since day 1 when I said that exactly this would happen. All we have is better testing methods and a ravaged economy, yet fundamentaly we are at square zero.

ISL 6y ago
There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path. The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.
- Johanx64 6y ago
  A lot of people that shouldn't and wouldn't have died are dead. Even more are unemployed, starving, homeless and in severe distress as a direct consequence. I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
  - wolco2 6y ago
    Those are the effects of moving society online. New winners and losers will emerge. A strong social safety net is helpful transitioning the losers back to productive winners. This was going to happen over a longer period of time anyhow.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Those aren't either/or decisions. Appropriate responses and better safety nets could have minimized both issues.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  What numerical value would you place on saving 100 lives? Virtually all of them over 80. $500m? $1b? $100b? Just for comparison about 80 young Australians died from suicide this week alone.
  - ry454 6y ago
    About zero, really. Unless some of those 80+ year olds are prominent scientists, etc. The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life. A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
  - zacharycohn 6y ago
    Economists value a human life at $10,000,000 USD (there's a great Planet Money podcast about this). Therefore, 100 lives would be worth about a billion dollars.
    - logicchains 6y ago
      That's the value of an average life. Health economists at e.g. the NHS actually use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year, to account for the fact that e.g. an 80 year old has fewer years of life left than a 10 year old.
    - amscanne 6y ago
      Medical decisions in the USA suggest that the statistical value of a “quality-adjusted life year” is ~$128,000 on average. Obviously the question of “life years” is critical in this context. Everyone would be in favor of sacrificing more to save healthy children than people who are 80+. (No one wants to see anyone die needlessly, but the children can live happy lives for another half-century.)
- deathgrips 6y ago
  >There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. If they had instead dropped a nuclear bomb on Melbourne, 0 people would have died from Covid19.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  True. I don’t think experts honestly thinks you can hammer the virus to zero though based on our knowledge of human behavior. Case in point, HIV has killed around 50 million over the past few decades, and we know exactly how it spreads, and it is quite easy to stop. If we can’t stop HIV, without a vaccine there is no way we can stop something airborne (which we now know SARS-CoV2 is).
Paradigma11 6y ago
We also have far better treatment methods and many ppl who get sick now would have died earlier.

ISL 6y ago

There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path. The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.

Johanx64 6y ago
A lot of people that shouldn't and wouldn't have died are dead. Even more are unemployed, starving, homeless and in severe distress as a direct consequence. I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
- wolco2 6y ago
  Those are the effects of moving society online. New winners and losers will emerge. A strong social safety net is helpful transitioning the losers back to productive winners. This was going to happen over a longer period of time anyhow.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Those aren't either/or decisions. Appropriate responses and better safety nets could have minimized both issues.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
What numerical value would you place on saving 100 lives? Virtually all of them over 80. $500m? $1b? $100b? Just for comparison about 80 young Australians died from suicide this week alone.
- ry454 6y ago
  About zero, really. Unless some of those 80+ year olds are prominent scientists, etc. The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life. A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
- zacharycohn 6y ago
  Economists value a human life at $10,000,000 USD (there's a great Planet Money podcast about this). Therefore, 100 lives would be worth about a billion dollars.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    That's the value of an average life. Health economists at e.g. the NHS actually use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year, to account for the fact that e.g. an 80 year old has fewer years of life left than a 10 year old.
  - amscanne 6y ago
    Medical decisions in the USA suggest that the statistical value of a “quality-adjusted life year” is ~$128,000 on average. Obviously the question of “life years” is critical in this context. Everyone would be in favor of sacrificing more to save healthy children than people who are 80+. (No one wants to see anyone die needlessly, but the children can live happy lives for another half-century.)
deathgrips 6y ago
>There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive. If they had instead dropped a nuclear bomb on Melbourne, 0 people would have died from Covid19.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
True. I don’t think experts honestly thinks you can hammer the virus to zero though based on our knowledge of human behavior. Case in point, HIV has killed around 50 million over the past few decades, and we know exactly how it spreads, and it is quite easy to stop. If we can’t stop HIV, without a vaccine there is no way we can stop something airborne (which we now know SARS-CoV2 is).

Paradigma11 6y ago

We also have far better treatment methods and many ppl who get sick now would have died earlier.