| HN Mirror

The value of statistical life [1] provides a method to estimate the dollar value of a life.

   There is no standard concept for the value of a specific human life in economics. However, when looking at risk/reward trade-offs that people make with regard to their health, economists often consider the value of a statistical life (VSL). Note that the VSL is very different from the value of an actual life. It is the value placed on changes in the likelihood of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid certain death.

Given that humans make choices to buy things that reduce their chance of death all the time, we have many sources of how people value their own lives. Humans are often bad at this calculation, yet surprisingly their willing to pay to reduce a certain risk divided by the reduction in risk is pretty consistent in its estimate of how much people value their lives. The number comes out to around $5-10M per life or $125K per year of life.

Thus, we can estimate how many people will be killed by COVID-19 versus the economic cost of trying to contain it and do a cost-benefit analysis.

I just did a quick and dirty Cost/Benefit for this purpose, which you can find here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Rn9NFw-ldpUVMEM6JvGU...

High level summary: If we assume that around the same number of people as the flu would be infected annually if we did not stop it, anywhere from 10 - 45 million Americans would catch it yearly. Let's use 20M for this calculation.

Let's assume a COVID-19 mortality rate of 1% given that there are likely way more undetected cases than confirmed cases (given the current rate wrt confirmed cases is closer to 2%).

(20,000,000 cases * 0.01 mortality rate) => 200,000 deaths per year.

Most of those deaths are the elderly. Thus, they have fewer years left to live. Let's take the expected age of a person who dies to be 60. Thus their value of remaining life that is lost is $2.4M. Times the total expected deaths is $475B per year of costs simply due to loss of life.

This doesn't take into account loss of future GDP (which is less than the loss of life though) from those deaths nor the loss of GDP from people being sick but recovering.

Then if we assume that to stop the virus, we will need a quarantine as severe as China's and thus suffer extreme economic impacts, then many sectors of the economy will contract dramatically. For example, China has seen a >90% reduction in car sales year over year due to Coronavirus.[2] Hopefully a lot of that will simply be transferred to a future quarter once they have recovered, but that is TBD. For travel, restaurants, etc, it certainly isn't.

I estimated the total cost for the US GDP of containing COVID-19 as $6,605B per year if the goal it to make it extinct like what happened to SARS.

Thus, it is absolutely worth paying the one time fee of losing 1/3 of one's GDP to not pay the perpetual tax of 2.3% of GDP annually due to it sticking around.

My biggest fear though is that we will pay the one time fee with hopes of making it go extinct and it will persist nonetheless in countries with weak public health infrastructure or lax quarantine enforcement. Thus, we will end up with it perpetually anyway. That is especially likely if countries start to believe it is as it becomes a race to the bottom / self fulfilling prophecy where no one wants to take the extreme cost to fight it when other countries are not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51583348

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/business/economy/china-co...