
The Covid-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life - mrfusion
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life
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asdfasgasdgasdg
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
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
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.

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maxerickson
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
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
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
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
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.

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justin66
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
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
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
> 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.

------
xxpor
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.

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tomhoward
Note this was published over three weeks ago – 05/25/20.

A long time for such a fast-changing situation.

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mewpmewp2
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.

~~~
happytoexplain
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
"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.

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

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Retric
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
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-
> 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
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.

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throwaway4666
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.

~~~
mewpmewp2
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.

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

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

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ykevinator
Anti vaxers

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recursivedoubts
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)

------
ciguy
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.

