[epgui]

I am a life scientist, and with respect, you're flatly incorrect. The first-order costs of public health measures scale linearly, and the first-order costs of infectious diseases scale exponentially. Higher-order costs are at least comparable between the two, and I would argue much higher in the case of covid than in the case of lockdowns.

(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)

[vorpalhex]

As a heads up, your bio still says you are a software engineer at CircleCI.

[epgui]

That I am, but I have 12 years of post secondary education (and research experience) in life science, mostly in biochem.

[Zanneth]

A vast majority of people who contract COVID recover without any treatment. Are you arguing that the minority who don't impose higher costs than locking down the entire country?

[greycol]

Lets assume that the only cost associated with covid is lost work. So lets weight death rate by age group and years to retirement i.e. if you're in the 50-59 age group you have a 1.3 percent death rate and we'll say 10 years till retirement, 20-29 0.2% and 40 years (we'll exclude people from 60 up as they obviously contribute nothing to society and their deaths are meaningless especially in a economic sense /s). We'll ignore age distribution as we're talking about Canada which has a population pyramid which is pretty much square accross ages 10-60 (similiar to US FYI).

So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.

In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.

So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.

NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.

[epgui]

This is obviously a gross oversimplification, but it's exactly the kind of napkin maths that people need to make before they pass judgment based on no more than gut-feeling and misguided suggestions from the internet.

Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0

[mastersummoner]

Over 900k dead in the US alone from covid. Sure, that's a minority, but can you really shrug your shoulders at that number and say it's just a minority, no big deal?

[Zanneth]

Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend mandating anything that gets in the way of people taking those risks if they choose to.

[davidgay]

> Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc.

Car accidents are 30-40k/year in the US, so 10% of covid. And the number of measures taken to reduce car accidents is extraordinary - age limits, compulsory driver's licenses, city design rules (roads, pedestrian crossings, etc, etc), speed limits, car construction regulations, compulsory insurance, and more. Given that, what's the appropriate level of regulation you suggest for covid?

[Zanneth]

I take the blame for originally mentioning car accidents, but this is not really something you can compare to COVID especially when you are talking about government mandates. A serious car accident is deadly for anyone, including teenagers or young working-aged adults. A COVID infection is not even close to as deadly for those age groups.

[epgui]

Do you want to try putting some numbers on these things, rather than vague qualitative comparisons, like our friend did here earlier? [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30342665

[epgui]

Like seatbelt mandates, taxes on tobacco products, food safety regulation (preventing the importation of certain hazardous foods), environmental regulation, or any other sort of coercive action (either against individuals, against corporations, or against government itself) taken by government to protect people?

It’s obviously a rhetorical question. I’d suggest that in all cases whether such mandates are appropriate depends on their proportionality relative to the harms they prevent.

[epgui]

I can only guess what your question is (sorry, bad grammar), but I’d rather not guess. What exactly is the question?