I criticized (here and here) a recent article that Tyler Cowen wrote in Bloomberg about COVID-19 and lockdowns. Last week he doubled down by raising the issue of the elderly. The title fits his theme, is “Yes, Covid-19 Is More Serious for the Elderly. So What?”
Cowen starts with an analogy to 9/11. (Everything in the shaded areas is a quote from his article.)
Consider 9/11, when some 3,000 Americans died. The U.S. mounted a very activist response that included new security procedures at airports, crackdowns on money laundering, increased surveillance and two wars. Not all of those choices were prudent, but nonetheless they qualify as a very vigorous response.
All true, but I wonder what point he is making. Then he gets to it.
The point is this: Had 3 Americans been killed rather than 3,000 — if, say, 9/11 was a U.S. holiday the hijackers didn’t know about, so fewer people were working — the optimal response would not have been all that different. There were a lot of casualties, but it is also significant that several airplanes were brazenly hijacked and flown into major iconic buildings, the Pentagon was hit, and Congress itself came under threat.
He says that “the optimal response” with 3 deaths plus the iconic destruction would not have been “all that different.” I gather he means that it would not be all that different from what would have been the optimal response with the actual 3,000 deaths. But he does not tell us what the optimal response to that was. Isn’t that the nub of the debate over lockdowns—what is the proper response?
I count Bush’s war on Iraq as one of the most evil government policies of this century. Even if you don’t agree, it was big. So if we got close to the optimal response, then Cowen is saying that the Iraq war was close to optimal. And, by the way, in case he or you need reminding, that war caused many thousands of deaths of young, old, and in-between. Almost all were relatively innocent.
Polities that do not respond to such attacks [as 9/11] soon find themselves out of business. Not only do they invite further intimidations, but their citizens lose faith in the government’s ability to maintain public order or shape the future of the nation. The entire U.S. system of government may well have been at stake in the decision to respond to 9/11 in a significant way.
Even for things like 9/11, we should reject Cowen’s argument. It would have to apply to every government whose country is attacked. Ethical principles generalize, or they are not principles. There’s nothing special about the United States is that respect. So, for instance, when the U.S. government attacked Iraq, Cowen’s recommendation would have had to be for the Iraqi government to attack the United States. That would likely have cost thousands of lives if they could have pulled it off. They probably couldn’t have, but then we’re stuck with the non-principle that might makes right.
But Covid is not like 9/11—unless Cowen wishes to suggest that the virus was biological warfare perpetrated by a foreign power. I don’t think that’s what he’s saying.
To be sure, the number of U.S. victims is high — 220,000 and counting, plus some number of excess deaths from broader causes. But the event itself is so cataclysmic that “downgrading” those deaths by saying many of the victims were elderly doesn’t make a big difference in terms of formulating an optimal response.
Cowen errs again in likening Covid to a military or terrorist attack. Yes, the murder of an ailing 80 year old is basically like the murder of a 20 year old. But succumbing to an illness does not involve the malicious conduct of malefactors. That takes the moral and legal question of wrongdoing out of the matter. Now we are left with plain hardship: Succumbing to an illness is much more tragic in the case of an otherwise healthy 20 year old than an ailing 80 year old. Any reasonable ethical reckoning would agree.
The focus on protecting the elderly flows simply from two facts: (1) they’re (we’re–I turn 70 next month and my wife is 71) most at risk and (2) they’re often retired and, therefore, are better able to isolate.
So I think it makes a huge difference in an optimal response. Let the people who are lower risk be out in the world. As they spread the virus, we augment immunity. That doesn’t hurt the elderly. It helps us.
Furthermore, it is likely that coronaviruses will return, which is all the more reason to excel in response now. To consider another example, during the 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS-1, 774 people died worldwide, none of them in America. The countries that took that virus seriously — Korea, Taiwan and Canada, to name a few — have performed much better during the current crisis. And many of the best biomedical responses, including vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, have evolved from very serious responses to previous pandemics.
I agree that we should excel. But how? Do you do it with lockdowns, or do you do it with deregulation, including allowing people to try various vaccines whatever stage they’re at, and allowing self-test kits for the virus to be sold, kits that could be available now for less than $10 a pop, but which the Food and Drug Administration won’t let us have?
And now Cowen’s pièce de résistance.
One final (rather outlandish) thought experiment: Imagine that an enemy of the U.S. demanded that 100 90-year-old Americans be handed over each year for execution. Of course America would refuse. The age of the victims would not be a factor in that decision.
Cowen persists in his false analogy of a terrorist or military attack.
As Ryan Sullivan, my co-author on my recent Wall Street Journal op/ed advocating that schools be opened, put it, millions of years of children’s lives are being robbed. Ryan has an autistic son in kindergarten and a daughter in first grade. Both, but especially the son, are losing a lot. Cowen’s policy is more analogous to the terrorist attack on 9/11 than the virus is.
Notice also, what’s missing in Cowen’s paragraph above: the idea of tradeoffs. Of course, we wouldn’t give over 90 to 100 year olds. But he’s willing to sacrifice the well-being of 50 million school-age children. Remember his casual “It just doesn’t seem worth it” remark about allowing kids to go back to school. He handles the tradeoff by not mentioning it.
Both of Cowen’s pieces resemble the work of a mainstream journalist ignorant of market economics. The essence of economics is tradeoffs. Precious little in his two pieces talks seriously about tradeoffs.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 26 2020 at 7:04pm
More of the same old arguments that totally ignore public health 101. It is always let the young go out and get infected and hope and pray that the vulnerable don’t get infected. How do explain that after six months, nursing homes cannot still be adequately protected? How do you explain to someone whose mother or father died from COVID-19 because the nursing home just couldn’t keep the germ out? The heartless son would say, “that’s life”, the concerned son would say, “we could have done better.”
It’s fine to say open up all the schools, the young don’t get very sick. Unfortunately some of their teachers might not be in the same position. Bryan Caplan has a post up today looking at students who come to class at GMU wearing masks. That’s great. Do you think an autistic kid who is in a special education program will be obedient in this way? A very close friend of mine is an elementary school special ed teacher who is doing everything over Zoom right now. That teacher has been in the position for five years and often has unruly children with a spectrum of difficulties. What do I (or you) tell this teacher to assuage fears that are very real of being bitten, spit on, or punched by a young student who may have COVID-19? These are very real concerns and have happened in the past (minus the COVID-19 obviously).
there is no question that children are being harmed by not being in school (an exception to this are the dedicated ones in high school who quickly adapt to Zoom). There are guidelines out there for providing as much safety as possible yet many school districts are not employing them because of the cost. A charter school in DC noted that compliance with recommendations would cost $200K. They did not have that kind of money.
You accuse Professor Cowen of being pedantic, I’m not sure that your suggestions are any better. I would take the argument seriously if you provided realistic solutions.
zeke5123
Oct 26 2020 at 10:36pm
It is funny. You say “More of the same old arguments that totally ignore public health 101.”
But you treat public health as if it is maximizing for simply one goal (i.e., lowering COVID deaths). It isn’t — health is holistic. Stated differently, health is about trade offs. Some of the trade offs you want us to make:
Kids missing out on crucial physical, mental, and social development that could permanently stunt them.
Kids missing out on some of the best times of their life forever — it will never come back.
People becoming isolated and turning to substance abuse. Substance abuse leading to deaths.
People losing jobs and falling further and further behind — that loss is possibly permanent.
People failing to get adequate treatment / testing for other illness that will cause death.
People simply missing out on the good things of life harming their mental health.
There are very real costs to your arguments, but best I can tell you dismiss them as not real. You can say we can try to do both (i.e., better fund schools) but as you suggest that isn’t really feasible. But do you know what is? Just open the schools like normal. Just open things up. Will people die? Yes. Will people die if things are locked down yes. But IFR is way down — at a certain point the costs start to outweigh the benefits.
From what I can tell, most of the public health community is not treating this as a cost/cost decision. They, like you, seem to want to optimize for one problem while ignoring the rest.
JFA
Oct 27 2020 at 6:35am
^ This right here. I would love it if K-12 schools had funding to implement widespread testing, but the fact that they don’t is not sufficient reason to shut them down. There are huge costs to this decision that “public health experts” just don’t seem to acknowledge (they also don’t seem to acknowledge that decisions are based on values in addition to costs… which is why near everyone in the public health community in early June was supporting huge gatherings in the form of protests and didn’t understand why they looked stupid).
And I have a hard time believing Zoom for special ed is going well. I have a couple of friends whose kids required special ed, and Zoom classes could not be described as going well. I have found my kindergartener literally banging his head against the desk. Of all the parents I know, maybe 5-10% have much of anything positive to say about online school.
Tyler Wells
Oct 27 2020 at 6:56am
Very well said, I am concerned for the health of my 75 year-old mother but obsessed with the well-being of my twelve year-old son. If she needs to stay out of contact with everyone so that he can have a childhood and grow and develop then so be it (she prefers the risk to not seeing it her grandchildren).
robc
Oct 27 2020 at 7:16am
At a nursing home protest the other day, one of the residents had a sign that said “I would rather die of COVID than loneliness.”
Dave Adsit
Oct 26 2020 at 7:23pm
I completely agree with your analysis of Cowen’s post.
Starting with the obvious, who can honestly argue that the following reactions represent the optimal response to the 9/11 attack?
new security procedures at airports – widely recognized as ineffective security theater
crackdowns on money laundering – not particularly relevant to the attacks other than as an attempt to fight the failed war on drugs
increased surveillance – a clear violation of natural rights and the US constitution while also being utterly ineffective at detecting or deterring terrorism
two wars – neither of which was perpetrated on the nation of origin for the majority of terrorists
Each of these “optimal” reactions has been extraordinarily costly to the US and international economy. Some of them are devastating in terms of human cost. And all are ineffective at their stated aims.
If these were the criteria for the selection of optimal responses, one could hardly imagine a better choice than the lockdowns and mask mandates. Decimating the global economy, dehumanizing our neighbors, accelerating mental health issues, and stealing experiences and options from the youngest generations is an insane price to pay.
None of this even speaks to the fundamental moral difference between a malicious agent and a non-sentient virus. We cannot possibly react strongly enough as a nation or species to create the kind of deterrent effect that will convince the next corona virus that we are a serious power not to be trifled with. The very thought is laughable.
Student of Liberty
Oct 28 2020 at 5:06am
Someone who likes to increase state surveillance.
It is not easy to implement such intrusive policies when everything is good so politicians who can take a crisis opportunity to implement a 20 years – and counting – surveillance policy without facing a backlash from the population can be proud of their evil achievements.
MarkW
Oct 26 2020 at 7:31pm
It is always let the young go out and get infected and hope and pray that the vulnerable don’t get infected.
It’s not a question of praying — it’s a question of keeping the vulnerable separated. I live in a college town with a predictable Covid outbreak among students that threatens me in no way. It’s just not hard to give them plenty of space. Nor does it threaten my 60ish neighbor who’s a professor…and teaches his classes online. Leave the kids alone to have the once-in-a-lifetime experiences they’re pay huge sums for. How many times do you get to be a college freshman?
The heartless son would say, “that’s life”, the concerned son would say, “we could have done better.”
My wife’s mother died about a year ago, a couple of months before Covid hit. She is thankful that her Mother, who was suffering from some dementia, did not have to undergo the trauma of forced isolation that she could not have comprehended. Would you say she is a ‘heartless’ daughter?
Do you think an autistic kid who is in a special education program will be obedient in this way?
I know they can be. My wife also sees many autistic kids in her practice (in small treatment rooms), and they have been great about mask-wearing actually.
A very close friend of mine is an elementary school special ed teacher who is doing everything over Zoom right now.
My wife has been seeing the very same population daily. And not just since September but throughout the pandemic. (And the idea that classes for young special-needs students can be taught effectively over Zoom is laughable).
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 26 2020 at 7:45pm
You might want to take a look at how well this worked out in La Crosse Wisconsin where there are three colleges and after the requisite ‘once in a life time’ party, infections and mortality among the elderly rose.
This is a laughably false analogy.
I congratulate her. The rest of your statement is laughable as you note. My teacher friend is having very good success with Zoom.
MarkW
Oct 26 2020 at 9:02pm
You might want to take a look at how well this worked out in La Crosse Wisconsin where there are three colleges and after the requisite ‘once in a life time’ party, infections and mortality among the elderly rose.
I’m pretty sure that Ann Arbor has more university students with Michigan alone than La Crosse does. There has been no such effect here.
This is a laughably false analogy.
It’s not. My Mother-in-law lived in her retirement home for a couple of decades. But until the last year and a half, she was capable enough that we could have (and would have) taken her out to live with us had Covid arrived during that time. But by the point she was in the nursing home unit, there was little time left for her or her neighbors. The other woman in her room had outlived two roommates in the space of a year. My M-I-L then outlived her, and then died a couple of months later. Denying people in that state, with relatively little time left, contact with their families is deeply cruel and there is almost nothing to be gained in length of life while there is a great deal to be lost in quality. Few of the people who were in that unit when the pandemic started are going to live to see the end of it regardless of Covid.
My teacher friend is having very good success with Zoom.
I’m skeptical. It’s all dueling anecdotes here, but my wife has hears from parents of her special needs patients that the video classes are not working well, and only work at all if they are sitting with their child essentially full time (at which point, they might as well home-school).
zeke5123
Oct 26 2020 at 10:42pm
Dude, just stop. My wife is an ex-teacher (stay at home right now). She has a lot of teacher friends. We have kids (preschool is oldest, but network lets us know older parents with kids). Through my work, I know many people with school age kids. Every single one say the kids are doing much worse and the training is far inferior.
As a simple exercise, if COVID was gone tomorrow do you think most parents would send their kids back to school or continue with Zoom? How much do you think the parents would need to get paid to continue with Zoom (presumably it could be large since Zoom is much cheaper).
I know you want to say Zoom is great because then you don’t have to face that the polices you advocate for result in a cost on the other side. But they do.
David Boaz
Oct 26 2020 at 8:26pm
I don’t know that Cowen should be assumed to be including the Iraq war as part of the response to 9/11. I think your argument would be stronger if you counted the Patriot Act, the creation of TSA and the department of homeland security, and the invasion of Afghanistan as the response.
Steven J Reilly
Oct 26 2020 at 9:20pm
David Boaz, in first quote from the article he says the response included two wars, so presumably that would mean Iraq: “The U.S. mounted a very activist response that included new security procedures at airports, crackdowns on money laundering, increased surveillance and two wars.”
David R. Henderson
Oct 26 2020 at 11:00pm
You wrote:
I don’t either. He didn’t make it clear. But he did include the Iraq War as part of the response.
You wrote:
I don’t know why. He didn’t distinguish between these and the Iraq War in terms of the response.
Tyler Cowen
Oct 26 2020 at 8:51pm
Come on David, you can do better than this. Virtually every sentence is a misreading.
David R. Henderson
Oct 26 2020 at 10:57pm
You wrote:
Well then it shouldn’t be at all hard for you to single out 3 sentences and say how I misread them. Please do so.
Todd Kreider
Oct 27 2020 at 12:28am
You seriously think Cowen will respond?
This is just one anecdote, but I read yesterday that a family friend in San Francisco in the upper 2% income bracket is having a tough time with online learning for his two kids. The 11 year old seems fine but the 5 year old hides under the table when she sees her teacher on the screen. The classes are all in Spanish but the 5 year old only knows English. Go SF!
JFA
Oct 27 2020 at 6:22am
“The classes are all in Spanish but the 5 year old only knows English. Go SF!” That’s probably because the parents chose a Spanish emersion program to send their 5-year-old to.
Todd K
Oct 27 2020 at 1:00pm
No, the family had moved into an area with many Spanish speakers when the pandemic hit.
Greg G
Oct 27 2020 at 10:48am
Tyler said that what the optimal response to the Sept. 11 attacks would have been did not depend on the number of casualties from that attack.
He did NOT say that our actual response was anything “close to the optimal response.” That was your key misreading and it led to much further confusion.
David R. Henderson
Oct 27 2020 at 11:36am
Greg G,
You wrote:
I know he didn’t say that. He wasn’t clear. Reread my response. I misread nothing.
Greg G
Oct 27 2020 at 1:19pm
OK I reread your response and it looked just the same as last time.
He says: ” Not all of those choices were prudent, but nonetheless they qualify as a very vigorous response.”
You then go on to suggest (right after admitting he doesn’t say what policy response would have been optimal) that, because they satisfied his requirement for being vigorous, he probably means the Iraq War was “close to optimal.” Here is the quote”
“So if we got close to the optimal response, then Cowen is saying that the Iraq war was close to optimal.”
Of course the “if” condition there was never met. Even so you continue on with the suggested non sequitur as follows:
“Ethical principles generalize, or they are not principles. There’s nothing special about the United States is that respect. So, for instance, when the U.S. government attacked Iraq, Cowen’s recommendation would have had to be for the Iraqi government to attack the United States.”
The fact that he doesn’t spell out what he thinks the optimal response to the 9/11 attacks would have been does not justify this kind of obvious straw manning. His post wasn’t about 9/11. He simply raised it to make the point that the people can rely too much on fatality counts in determining policy decisions. That the 9/11 response was an example of that, showing it is possible, was his point.
You then cite his failure to talk about trade offs in a three sentence paragraph to suggest he is ignorant about trade offs. This is all wildly uncharitable and not like you David. You are better than this.
Alice
Oct 26 2020 at 10:01pm
Nope, can’t agree. Cowen’s piece, or any of his writings, never display ignorance of market economics. Quite the opposite. In the big picture scheme of things, his prudence might be brilliance. As a high school teacher in NYC, teaching in a classroom every day, I’m banking on the collective caution of New Yorkers and the imminent winning vaccine to protect me.
Don Boudreaux
Oct 27 2020 at 12:21pm
Tyler is indeed an extraordinarily talented, market-oriented economist, which is why David likely ended this post as he did. It’s an ending with which I, at least, agree. In Tyler’s most recent writings in defense of the continuation of the dramatic and unprecedented reduction in social interactions he treats reducing the spread of the coronavirus as an end so important that most of the other considerations that people raise against this policy count for little or nothing.
Reasonable people, of course, can and do disagree over just how such trade-offs are to be made. But the centrality of the need to make trade-offs – for such a need is indeed central – is not featured in these of Tyler’s writings. To the extent that it’s there at all, it’s in the background, not emphasized. Escaping Covid-19 is dominant end.
My wish is that a voice as loud and as powerful as is Tyler’s would be used instead to clearly remind the general public of the inescapability of trade-offs – that reducing deaths from Covid-19 comes at a price, and that no reduction in Covid deaths is worth an infinite price. Overvaluing the reduction in Covid deaths – which Tyler risks doing by arguing that the advanced age of Covid’s chief victims is largely irrelevant – is not at all prudent. Genuine prudence requires that the downsides of combatting Covid with lockdowns and other measures that obstruct normal human interactions be taken more seriously into account than Tyler seems to do. And note that among these downsides is the growth of arbitrary government power – a social virus, if you will, that might lie dormant for a while after Covid-19 is over, but, having been enhanced in 2020, will strike dangerously in the future.
Don B
Oct 27 2020 at 1:23pm
Let me take another stab at trying to say what I said, in my previous response to Alice, too poorly.
The main – and perhaps only really worthwhile – role of the good economist when engaging with the public is to counteract popular misconceptions and biases. The general public needs no help in failing to look past that which is obvious to that which is less obvious. It needs no help in failing to recognize that all benefits have costs and all costs have benefits. With equal ease the general public misses the fact that there are no solutions to economic challenges, only trade-offs. And, of course, the general public isn’t accustomed to thinking of trade-offs being made at the margin.
The mainstream media and nearly all politicians have responded to Covid-19 as predicted – that is, with all of the above, and other, fallacious beliefs and poor reasoning.
And so when Tyler – a truly brilliant economist with a well-earned major platform – writes, as he sometimes does, that escaping Covid is a singular value – a value, an end, worth all the pain, agony, distress, disruption, anxiety, uncertainty, and increased material deprivation that policies and attitudes since March have inflicted on humanity – it seems (at least to this economist, one not remotely in Tyler’s league, talent-wise) to be a sadly missed opportunity to add the most economic insight and perspective where such insight and perspective is most needed.
To value escaping Covid above all, or to treat this goal as one so valuable that all the complaints of anti-lockdowners are dismissed with little serious attention, is to falsely reassure the general public that taking all these steps to escape Covid is prudent. To the general public such steps do indeed seem to be prudent. To instill such a notion into the heads of the general public, no economist is needed.
But the insight of the sound economist – rare in the best of times, and rarer even now – is that what seems prudent on the surface (such as escaping an unusually deadly disease as quickly as is physically possible) is in fact imprudent if the price paid for such an escape is too high. And this price will be too high if the general public isn’t sufficiently aware of what is being sacrificed as a result – if the public remains under the natural impression (one fed by the media) that they and their political leaders are correct to treat escaping Covid as quickly as possible a singularly important aim.
Finally, the good economist also reminds his or her audience that there is no escaping the need to pay such a price, and that this price is not merely in the form of reduced outputs of guns, butter, and bubbly.
Mark Z
Oct 26 2020 at 10:46pm
I’m fairly sympathetic to Cowen’s position that herd immunity and ‘infect the young but protect the old’ aren’t viable strategies, but I found his argument here totally unconvincing; he’s trying too hard to make a creative new argument.
Tyler presents juxtapositions that expose the irrational inconsistency in how people view deaths and tragedies, and suggests, in essence, that the fact that people (‘society’) are so irrational in their perceptions of death (which deaths count as cataclysms warranting a response, which we shrug our shoulders at) is itself somehow an argument against viewing death more rationally. I think the 9/11 argument is particularly ridiculous: had America responded to 9/11 like a nation of Vulcans and treated it like a month’s worth of flu deaths, hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars would’ve been spared. ‘Society’s’ irrational attitudes toward death isn’t an argument for anything other than trying to convince society to be more rational. It just seems like an “it is so, therefore it ought to be so” type of argument.
Isaac Rand
Oct 26 2020 at 10:55pm
While I agree that trade-offs are important I don’t think these are being entirely ignored. Tyler’s 9/11 analogy may be unfortunate but his position (based on this post – I don’t have access to Bloomberg) appears to be implicitly realistic about the current overton window. Yes 90% of Covid-related deaths are to the 60+ age group but imposing restrictions on their movements is not a feasible policy option. Maybe the trade-offs are being internalized by a larger number of people than appreciated?
Don Boudreaux
Oct 27 2020 at 1:57pm
Mr. Rand:
Serious question: If “imposing restrictions on their [60-year-old-plus people] movements is not a feasible policy option,” what makes imposing restrictions on the movements of the entire population feasible?
Perhaps you mean that it’s infeasible to impose restrictions on the movement of any age group and, instead, favor some lesser mandates, such as mask-wearing. But because many of the people who are intensely frightened of Covid, and who regard escaping it as a singular goal, wish to impose restrictions on the ability of people of all ages to assemble together, it would be odd to oppose restricting the movements of a sub-group of the population on ground of infeasibility while endorsing restrictions on the movements of the entire population.
Isaac Rand
Oct 27 2020 at 7:09pm
Dear Mr Boudreaux – I am not disagreeing that there could be a better optimal response to the pandemic or agreeing that restrictions on all are driven by an extreme risk perception of a minority leading to population wide controls. I think the prospect of imposing a strict lock down on a large subset of the population is politically and culturally unfeasible because it is likely seen as unfair/illiberal and repugnant by most. This perception can change, for example if the economic fallout is severe but for now maybe people are accepting of an equal level of shared freedom of movement albeit reduced compared to before.
I agree that the impact of this is also unfair – particularly on lower wage workers however it is not surprising that shared cultural values may trump an economist view of an optimal policy during a crisis in the short term. My perception is that people are not really clamoring to lock seniors up so that they can get back to their lives quicker. Tyler’s position appears to be implicitly recognizing this cultural preference and political reality.
sk
Oct 27 2020 at 2:54pm
just more of the same old Libertarian junky views. Interesting that economic policy should largely be the purview of economists, and public health issues should be as well. Yes, economic implications , but first and foremost Covid is a public health issue and public health issues should lead the charge with nuanced thinking taking in to account regional differences.
Some how the term Herd Immunity gets tossed around by economists as if they really know what they are talking about
Jonathan Seder
Oct 27 2020 at 5:30pm
Mr Cowen’s biggest mistakes are his assumptions that a vaccine is coming soon, and that our non-pharmaceutical interventions actually make a difference. Neither of those are certainties.
Today’s announcement that AstraZeneca is abandoning its antibody therapy suggests that the current vaccine strategy of producing an antibody response is not certain to succeed. In the past it has taken at least four years, and typically five to ten years, to produce a novel vaccine for the general population. Previous attempts to create coronavirus vaccines have not succeeded.
It’s also not at all clear that NPIs are effective. The evidence favoring masks is very weak. There are high level of transmissions in long-term care facilities where trained professionals wear fitted masks and other protective equipment. And it’s not clear that “social distancing” has any effect, especially outdoors.
People working in health policy have developed a currency for tradeoffs, namely the value of a year of potential life lost (YPLL). Until recently, the value of a YPLL was $50,000-$250,000. Somehow with Covid-19 YPLLs are valued at $5 million or more.
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