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Comment by Devils-Avocado | Hacker News Reader

The Federal Government forecasts debt will increase by $500billion due to the pandemic response.

If we take the deathtoll from Sweden (lower than the USA, Spain, Italy, Belgium), Australia could have expected 15,000 deaths, adjusted for population. Less if we consider only excess deaths.

This is $33 million per life saved, typically for a person in their 80s.

Is this a good use of funds?

If this money was devoted instead to tackling climate change or domestic air pollution (basically the same thing), how many lives would have been saved and improved instead?

Its likely that the country could have been completely decarbonised - all coal power plants shutdown, urban wood burning banned and new efficient gas heaters and insulation subsidised, and all new vehicle sales replaced with electrics.

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I also saw someone else say if we had done the Sweden approach and allowed those 15k deaths and saved all that money and ALSO made cigarettes illegal we would have saved many orders of magnitude more lives.

I'd bite that bullet - cigarettes should be banned.

In Australia the tax on them is continuously ramped up every year and fewer and fewer people take up the habit. It's obviously an elimination strategy there as with COVID.

That's 25 grand per person. If life goes back to normal for Australians for 1-2 years before everyone else, that's a bargain.

Considering that the Australian economy is based on digging and has an economic complexity just below Uganda[0], most of that damage was unavoidable anyway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Complexity_Index

Australia will be the slowest to go back to normal since they will need to maintain national quarantine forever - until a suitable vaccine is found and administered.

$25,000 per person is a huge amount of money, far greater than for any national scheme, ever. Probably approaching Australia's expenditure for a world war or major international conflict.

Keep in mind that currently in Europe - there is very limited excess mortality. For example in Belgium right now, there are less excess deaths than from a heatwave in August:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country

Sweden and other non-lockdown countries are already back to normal. The only thing preventing normality is politicians who insist on lockdowns for a virus which is currently not causing excess deaths beyond what we would expect from regular influenza.

The fear is the trend, not the numbers so far. Belgium's healthcare system is at breaking point, and the death rate is doubling maybe every 10 days:

https://chrisbillington.net/COVID/Belgium.svg

Well, my parents live in Perth. They've been living a normal existence since May.

Monetarily, it's no different than any other medical expenditure. Would you spend 25k for an extra year of normal life? What about if you're 20-30?

Colour me jealous.

In Sweden 0.06% of the population has died from COVID, and those that did have a median age of about 80.

Would you pay $25,000 in order to have a 1 in 1,666 chance of living an extra few months when you are 80 years old?

No one would take those odds - but it has been forced on the population.

I'm not talking about dying, I'm talking about normal life.

I live in Denmark, with arguably more restrictions than Sweden. I'd happily sacrifice 25k in future lifetime earnings to have 2020 back. (BTW, as a startup founder, the possible costs of COVID may wind up being far more disastrous to my lifetime earnings)

Wow, Australia has an astoundingly low ECI. Is there any way this could be confounded? I know we're no USA in this respect, but it still comes as a surprise.

We mostly sell ore, meat, and grain. If I'm reading the ECI right this takes no particular skill and these are common products that many countries in the world can produce, explaining the low score. It's why we rank alongside so many African nations.

It doesn't seem to take into account internal economies, but I don't know how we fare there.

I understand that, and if the ECI is normalised by total economic output, it would make sense for it to be low in Australia for that reason.

But if you subtracted these industries from Australia, I would expect there to be more knowledge and technology industry remaining than in some of the countries with a higher ECI. So if ECI is not normalised by total economic output, I would be surprised.

Normalising by economic output makes it a bit of a misleading metric. Australia could have world-class knowledge and tech sectors (they don't, but they could), and yet ECI would be low just because some low-complexity sector was booming.

Not normalising at all is pretty fraught too though. I guess it has the potential to mislead in both cases.

Good point, I hadn't really considered the effect of normalizing by GDP.

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