I like what retired Professor John A. Lee has to say. Economist Dan O’Brien is also very succinct: How much punishment are we willing to inflict on young people?
The guy who put this together clearly doesn’t like the message of Professor Tomas Ryan, the advocate of lockdowns, as evidenced by the crawls he types on the screen as Ryan talks. I found this alternately amusing and annoying.
Trivia question: What is the number of people under age 25 who have died of COVID-19 in Ireland?
The answer is in the 16-minute video.
HT2 Don Boudreaux.
READER COMMENTS
BC
Oct 25 2020 at 4:59am
A recent analysis estimated the years of lost life in the US due to Covid-19 as 2.5M years [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/health/coronavirus-statistics-deaths.html]. This number is being reported to “play up” the impact of the virus. However, with a US population of 325M, this works out to an average of 0.77% of a year, or 2.8 days, per person. The reason that *per capita* lost years is relevant is that lockdowns and other mitigation measures impose costs on the entire population, not just to those that end up dying.
So, if we could have eliminated *every* Covid death through additional lockdown, but that additional lockdown caused the average person to lose more than 3 days of quality life, then the aggregate damage of the additional lockdown would have exceeded the life years saved. The cure would have indeed been worse than the disease. Now, of course, quarantining a person for 3 days doesn’t cause 3 days of lost quality life. The person can still enjoy food and maybe some TV or internet surfing during those 3 days. However, if you asked people how much earlier at the end of their life they would be willing to die if they could have lived the last 7 months “normally”, I’m not sure that the average answer would be much less than 7 months. So, a day of quarantine causes some significant fraction (though less than 1) of lost quality life.
Early in the pandemic, someone tried to use value of statistical life (VSL) analysis to argue that it would be worth shutting down the US economy for several years to save lives. They compared VSL to lost US GDP, but that’s wrong. Shutdowns don’t just deprive us of GDP, they also deprive the entire population of quality life days. Suppose we could put the entire US population into a special stasis for a year, where everyone would resume life as normal after the year but would die at the same time that they would have died without the stasis. The per-capita GDP cost of that stasis would be about $63k. However, each person would also lose 1 year VSL, about ($10M / 80yrs) = $125k. So, quality life losses from shutdown can be bigger than GDP losses.
With an estimated true infection fatality rate of 0.5-1.0%, the number of people that won’t die from Covid-19 even if infected plus the number that won’t be infected is more than 100-200x the number that could die if infected. When lockdowns are imposed on the entire population, not just those most at risk, the lockdowns impose dispersed costs on the many for concentrated benefits to the few.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 25 2020 at 11:31am
These ongoing posts about COVID-19 lockdowns continue to miss the main point. Focusing only on mortality is the wrong approach when it really needs to be preventing transmission. Yes, those under the age of 19 have less mortality than other age groups but also suffer from multisystem inflammatory syndrome in higher numbers than other age groups. The also are viral carriers and capable of maintaining transmission within the society. I don’t see anything in these ongoing posts that address this fundamental problem.
The initial lockdown in March was needed in some areas to relieve pressure on the hospital systems. It is doubtful that such a lockdown will happen again but why haven’t regions outside of the Northeast learned from that lesson and at least implemented simple public health measures as a requirement for wearing masks? Look at what his happening in the Midwest and even some rural states that had virtually no case loads in March.
I would be most interested to hear a solution from David as to how to slow down transmission.
David Seltzer
Oct 26 2020 at 4:10pm
Alan, fair question as to slowing transmission. I see it as a cost-benefit issue. To slow transmission comes with economic, mental health and freedom costs. In order to attenuate a negative externality, do these costs exceed the benefit achieved with forced lockdowns? Seems like a fertile field for study.
Thomas Hutcheson
Oct 25 2020 at 1:08pm
A “debate” consisting in two guys trying to burn down the straw man of the other is not worth much.
If only we could only have each arguing for their own version of optimum (that is how to go from the best recent estimates of how the virus is spread, disaggregated current status on the spread and disaggregated costs of mitigation to get to a local policy recommendation)! Advice from public choice theorists on how to adjust the “optimum” to political reality is welcome.
MarkW
Oct 25 2020 at 4:53pm
How Much Should Young People Be Punished?
Very much less than they are now. I live in Ann Arbor where the county health department and university have ordered the lockdown of the entire undergraduate population (including even the majority who live in off-campus housing). It’s absurd, obscene, Orwellian and almost certainly illegal. And these are 18-22 year olds who are A) very unlikely to get more than mildly ill, and B) well-segregated from the general population.
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