
Americans Are Already Too Diseased to Go Back to Work - fortran77
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/obesity-us-health-coronavirus.html
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robocat
“In short, the economic costs of this collateral damage are incalculable.“

I find these statements frustrating. Any estimates will be imperfect, but that
doesn’t mean it is worthless trying to judge the costs to help make decisions.

For a first order estimate, compare expected reduction in years of life for
(a) effects of economic hardship, versus (b) getting virus. Use years not
dollars, to help avoid the knee jerk reaction to most economic analyses.

For a more fine grained estimate, start adding in estimates for quality of
life, externalities of death, etc.

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Gibbon1
I remember doing that after reading a Wall Street Journal article in the late
80's that was demanding we stop wasting money on AID's research and spend the
money on worthy diseases, like cancer, stoke and heart disease.

Thing is if you estimated years of productive life lost AID's was at least as
bad as heart disease. Because back then heart disease killed mostly old people
and AID's killed young people.

If I had to assign a batting average for the Wall Street Journal in terms of
public health I'd give them a 0.0

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rdtwo
That kind of reminds me of the military ordering fighter jet seats for an
average fighter pilot only to discover that no average pilot existed and
everyone was outside the expected range in one catagory or the other

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fortran77
> Only 12 percent of Americans over age 20 are considered metabolically
> healthy — that is, with optimal measures for waist circumference, blood
> sugar, blood pressure and lipids, and not taking drugs to control these risk
> factors.

If only we can reward/incentivize people for having control over things that
are 100% in our control, like waist circumference.

