[glormph]

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but the outcome of quarantining measures is not only monetary. If the economy suffers more to solve the current crisis, more people will die because of secondary effects. I guess that is included in the calculations.

[jonathanstrange]

Yes, these kind of factors should be included in a proper evaluation. Monetary value usually only serves as an exchange medium in compensatory models, you can also use abstract utils instead.

My point was a bit different, that from the perspective of multi-attribute decision theory with standard additive models the trade-offs between various attributes only need to be consistent (~not violate axioms of additive models, if the model is supposed to be additive in the first place), but they can be based on any kind of value judgments.

Even if you use standard measures in health care like QUALYs and weigh this attribute in a way that was previously accepted, the attribute would traditionally only be evaluated within the normal health care budget, which doesn't apply here. It is not usually aggregated together with completely different attributes like economic costs over time, number of unemployed people over time, increase of homelessness, overall reduction of the quality of life for healthy people, and so on.

I fear that in the coming months people will pick whatever weights suit their agenda and come up with various models of "costs" here and there, instead of arguing clearly for their position and the underlying value judgments. This is not a new problem, of course, and it is further aggravated by social pressures and institutional habits/self-interest.