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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I would be curious if someone ran a health economics analysis on lockdowns.

The UK sets the value of 1 quality adjusted life year (QALY) at 20-30k GBP. Basically, if a new medical technology costs more than that they say “no, it’s not worth it” (though there are exceptions).

It shouldn’t be hard to figure out the cost of the shutdown and divide it by the number of QALYs gained.

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I think it is pretty hard to compute the cost, because what's the counterfactual? Even if you don't force a shutdown people may still opt to isolate themselves and businesses may opt to close, and the degree to which they do so is probably dependent on the dynamics of the pandemic, so you're going to be pretty sensitive to modeling errors.

That’s a fair point, but even a rough estimate would be interesting.

Say all increased gov’t spending to support people who lost their jobs during the shutdown. It’s a known number.

Sure it would be very rough, but just knowing the relative magnitude would be interesting. Is it $1,000 per QALY or $100,000 per QALY?

The problem with such attempts at a 'rational' explanation of why one or the other approach works better is that we are talking about an irrational issue. It's easy for 30-something people with no preconditions to think they can rationalize themselves out of a lockdown... but the moment their parents and grandparents start dying, all of a sudden all rationality goes out of the window.

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