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Comment by chrispeel | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see someone do an analysis of how much each state is (implicitly) valuing a statistical life in the COVID19 age. For example, given state A which opens quickly, and state B which opened much more cautiously, it seems that A is valuing lives at a lesser amount, while B is valuing each life more. I guess this could be tricky to tease out of the data, yet it seems like it could be fun problem for an economist and a statistician to team up on

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You'd have to work out the human cost linked to the cost of economic losses from lockdown, though. Unemployment increases death rate and shortens lifespan. I'd love to see somebody do this too, but it's a mountain of work.

Another factor to consider is that nobody knows the future. Let's say I invest $10m in a scheme that I expect to save 10 lives. Alas, the guy I gave the money to chose to spend it all in Vegas then jump off a tall building. If you look at outcomes alone I spent $10m for -1 lives. Does this mean I value lives at -$10m?

Applying this to coronavirus response, it is more likely that the fast-opening states have convinced themselves that the infection rate can be kept under control, and it will cost them less in terms of both lives and money to open sooner. Whether they're right or not is another matter entirely, but people lose their life savings betting on the stock market all the time.

> Applying this to coronavirus response, it is more likely that the fast-opening states have convinced themselves that the infection rate can be kept under control, and it will cost them less in terms of both lives and money to open sooner.

Yes, I agree. See https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828345390/pandemic-onomics-le...

I agree that this would be an interesting problem, except that it assumes the response a reasoned trade-off. We are observing the handful of leaders who decided to kill grandma for money winding up with a worse economic situation than the leaders that who sensibly. Certainly this was based on a callous disregard for people's lives, but it might not look that way in the recovery data since they didn't get what they paid for.

If you want to pretend the likes of Bolsonaro and Trump and Lukashenko are behaving reasonably, that would mean they are putting a negative value on human life. I doubt even the modern wave of authoritarians are quite that bad.

I dunno, if you would prefer that all your political opponents would drop dead, and your political opponents number > 50% of the population, then you do indeed put a negative net value on human life.

That makes some huge assumptions about COVID Response, as well as the cost of lockdown which is non-zero value in both lives and money.

Other factors such as weather, mask wearing, prohibitions on large gathering vs total lock down, nursing home response, orders that moved people to nursing homes, and about 100 other factors

This implication of "open states are killing people" is a false narrative and not based on any actual data

> This implication of "open states are killing people" is a false narrative and not based on any actual data

My understanding from the following paper is that opening too soon does indeed both kill people and also depresses the economy. See also the title of the paper: "Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu"

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58f6b1c3e6f2e1a8b58d5...

Did you even read that report before using it to refute my statement? Or did you just read the title?

Nothing in this refutes what I said and many things support it. For example they highlight that NPI's are often meaningless because people will naturally avoid some things given the virus risk, this is their justification for saying that NPI do not cause economic harm because even if there were not government mandates then people would have naturally not participated in the economy anyway.

If this is the case then why the need for the lock-downs? it is circular reasoning at its finest.

Further they are talking about the effects of social distancing, mask wearing, and public gathering bans not total economic lockdown like is being imposed in many regions.

As I said in the original comment I support the idea of limiting or eliminating public gatherings, mask wearing, etc.

What I have problem with is the selective picking of which retailers can be open, and which can not, which businesses are "essential" and which are not. All businesses are essential to the employees, owners, and customers that depend on them, and it should be up to those individuals to determine if they are properly manage the risk (i.e enforce mask wearing, sanitation, social distancing, curb side pickup, etc) or if they need to close.

The government response in many regions is pure authoritarianism and an over reaction.

The study also points out some GLARING differences and limitation between COVID and 1918, a few of them are

1. COVID19 has a much lower mortality rate then 1918 flu for prime age workers

2. They acknowledge that NPI's where far less draconian in 1918 in most regions than many governments response to COVID was, this likely increased the economic impact of NPI's in those regions

3. The closure of schools in 1918 had FAR less economic impact in 1918 due the much lower female labor participation

4. Their study of economic conditions leading up to 1918 is incomplete as the data set is not there

5. WWI .... that is a pretty big impact.

So no I do not find this paper to be a compelling report on how the response to covid depressed economic activity vs COVID itself, also in no way does this paper support the conclusion that "opening too soon does indeed kill people " as it is absent any analysis on if banning public indoor gatherings + mask wearing is just as effective (or more effective) than the complete closure of "non-essential" businesses

It also has no analysis on other items such as population density, weather, mass transit, and about 100 other factors of virus spread

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