26 Comments

What would you cite as best current source on that?

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Your QALYs figures are based in a flawed study btw, which ignored deaths in nursing homes. The real mean QALYs lost for corona are far lower. This actually strengthens your argument though.

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The 1930s had the lowest increase in life expectancy for any decade in the first half of the 20th century. Being poor shortens life expectancy ceteris paribas.

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I would like to see the debate but missed it, is it available anywhere?

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It is entirely possible that this virus becomes endemic, we never get a good vaccine and the economic costs in terms of morbidity (because it will be far more important than mortality from an economic perspective) will leave us no choice but permanent containment.This is the worst case scenario and the one we should prepare for.

Mitigation may not be an option at all.

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The Young Guns will get their summer!

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Governments can often reduce the panic with strict restrictions by making it look like something is being done. It depends mostly on how the restrictions go over in the media. They can also make things worse in any number of ways, and looking indecisive, calous, or incompetent is as much of a danger as restricting too many things for too long.

But anyway, governments need to chose from possible alternatives, and it seems that you think there is an alternative where lots of people get the virus but few people are concerned and the economy essentially ticks along without much change. Modern media coverage of a new virus that ostensibly no one is immune to won't let that happen. There is no future path that involves a majority of people getting sick in a period less than a year with little economic damage. There are possible future paths that involve a minority of people getting sick and less economic damage.

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Panic can indeed lead to too much prevention. But when the government mandates even more prevention, it makes that panic problem worse. To convince people that there is such a problem, I need to show that we are in fact doing too much prevention effort. Which is what I've tried to do.

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What we are experiencing is public panic - people fear for their older relatives and themselves but in an exagerated herd mentality way. While the virus remains a present threat, that fear and panic as pushed through the media remains, even if it changes to apprehension rather than classical panic. This is what does the economic damage.

Where I am, at every step of the way there have been more shops and restaurants closed than required by law. Starting from Chinese patrons deserting Chinese restaurants in January and forcing many to close. I know this is the case in many other places.

The economic damage is proportonal to the panic, which is largely the case numbers and deaths as reflected in the local media. Governments for the most part respond to this panic and are often part of it. Having a plan that gains public confidence stems the panic and aprehension and reduces the economic damage. It doesn't matter so much what the plan is - it just needs to be confidence inspiring.

China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Iceland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, all show how containment can work. They have calmed the panic and minimiseed economic damage - the Western countries amoung them still have quite some apprehension being their first time at doing this and being culturally connected to more panicing countries.

Sweden has done the best of the mittigators. The UK and the Netherlands succumed to the panic and became containers. Sweden has a particularly calm and rational population with a media not quite as prone to winding people up and trust in their government, which is actually able to provide some protection to the elderly. But they still have a lot of economic damage and deaths. Their results are not as inspiring as Taiwan by any measure.

You continue to leave out herd panic from your models, as if somehow everything is a matter of which policy, and as if economics is not a matter of society wide cooperation. The herd panic is the economic damage. The primary way government policy helps economically is by calming the panic through credibility and buy-in from the public.

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Seems like Sweden should be more open to trying Variolation and human challenge trials see that they are going herd immunity.

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Thanks for writing this. It's changed my position from pro-contain to pro-mitigate.

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Perhaps it is time for a twitter poll? Who’s willing to be exposed to COVID for the sake of the economy?

I’m guessing very few.

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Yes some costs are sunk, but with diminishing returns they give us info on the marginal cost of future costs. If we've already spent to much, we are at more risk of spending too much in the future.

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"it seems to me" isn't much of an argument.

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Robin,

It seems to me that Americans won't accept being infected by a virus which even Chinese peasants are terrified of. Thus the economy won't return to "normal" until after the virus is contained - or until there is a treatment/vaccine/variolation. Note that Sweden's GDP numbers don't look great.

Or to put it more pithily - you confuse damage caused by the virus with damage caused by lockdowns.

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I guess the advice should be tailored to the audience - People who care enough to listen to 2-hour policy debates might tend to be overly risk-averse (I know at least I am).

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