Enlarge / Economic downturns mean less of this kind of thing. (credit: huggs2 / Flickr)
Debates about the economic cost of lockdown and whether the lives saved are worth the price show no signs of abating. The arguments continue despite near-consensus among high-profile economists that ending lockdowns in the United States right now would result in more economic damage than returning to business as usual.
As Ars has reported, economists at the University of Wyoming have used US federal agency guidelines on how much a human life is worth to establish that, under a range of realistic scenarios, the value of lives saved by lockdown will far exceed the economic hit. And economists at the Federal Reserve and MIT have questioned the assumption that the economic cost of lockdown would in fact be higher than the economic hit that would be caused by allowing the virus to run rampant. Their analysis found that cities that had more aggressive public health responses to the 1918 flu pandemic fared better economically.
But there's another question being asked: won't a recession also cause loss of life? And how would this loss of life compare to the lives saved from COVID-19 by a lockdown?
Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment