{"id":131016,"date":"2020-05-24T11:40:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-24T19:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=131016"},"modified":"2020-05-24T14:11:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-24T22:11:59","slug":"steve-sailer-how-many-quality-adjusted-life-years-is-coronavirus-costing-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=131016","title":{"rendered":"Steve Sailer: How Many Quality-Adjusted Life Years Is Coronavirus Costing Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comments at Steve Sailer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* If age is a relevant factor in the valuation (and surely it is) then that opens the door to a host of other factors that we\u2019re not allowed to mention.<\/p>\n

The upshot and the implication is that some lives actually do matter more than others. Vastly more, in fact, and this offends our sense of equity.<\/p>\n

Already in calculations such as those attending compensation for death in plane accidents, potential future earnings are considered.<\/p>\n

Maybe some people\u2019s lives are worth 10 or 20 million. But some are approximately nil and some appear to be negative.<\/p>\n

* From a strictly economic point of view, the death of 70-90 year olds does not come at a great cost. Definitely not $10 million. These are people long past their earning years and who cost the system a huge amount of money. In fact, think the optimal course of action from an economic point of view would be to pull a Cuomo nationwide and plant COVID-19 patients in every nursing home in the USA, while the rest of us live our lives as normal. Of course, that is ridiculous, but if we really want to discuss whether the \u201ccure is worse than the disease\u201d, we must be honest about what is happening.<\/p>\n

* Are Covid-19 death numbers inflated? It\u2019s said that if you have the virus and get hit by a car, you are counted as a coronavirus victim.<\/p>\n

And there is apparently a financial incentive for hospitals to do so \u2013 they get additional Covid-19 aid money.<\/p>\n

Since so many of the deaths are of very old people with underlying health problems, this could be quite an overstatement.<\/p>\n

* The vast majority of the people dying are a net drain on the economy. Very old and unhealthy people don\u2019t contribute. <\/p>\n

* In the first-cut cost-benefit analysis, the \u201clost life\u201d for all 330 million Americans during the lockdown should be included.<\/p>\n

Of course, then there\u2019s the added costs from the destruction of our economic and social fabric of job losses, bankruptcies, substance-abuse, suicides, ballooning debt, etc.<\/p>\n

* YEARS OF POTENTIAL LIFE LOST … the ultimate metric in rational coronavirus analysis<\/a><\/p>\n

As Winston Churchill allegedly quipped: Keep experts on tap, not on top. The Wall Street Journal runs commentary (5\/14, behind WSJ paywall) on how the good Dr. Fauci\u2019s expertise is narrow, and that he\u2019s unequipped to consider societal costs outside his disease-control focus, and freely admits that.<\/p>\n

From the very start of this madness, the metric years of potential life lost (PYLL) should have been the critical consideration, but unfortunately wasn\u2019t. Has Dr Fauci or his colleagues at the CDC or WHO even uttered these words in public?<\/p>\n

The JUST FACTS website of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) features articles judiciously using the YPLL metric to evaluate the wisdom of the COVID-19 shutdown:
\nComparing the PYLLs of a projected Coronavirus death toll in the United States of 240,000 with other \u2018everyday tragedies\u2019, such as the flu, accidents and suicides (4\/8, comparison chart below), and
\nOn the casualties from the drastic government-mandated shutdown, FEE projects that the anxiety from reactions to COVID-19 will destroy at least seven times more years of life than can be saved by lockdowns (5\/4).
\nMeanwhile, ABC News recently ran a story citing that the people with coronavirus are dying an average of 10+ years earlier than they would have naturally (5\/10), based on a study by the University of Glasgow (lots of detailed data presented). As the median age of COVID-19 deaths is near 80, the average PYLLs are inflated by inclusion of deaths of people much younger, and this surely is impacted somewhat by the accounting of dying with, rather than dying from, COVID-19.<\/p>\n

Although our personal lockdowns may have some charms, it could be suggested that every American has \u2018life lost\u2019 in this ongoing collective adventure \u2026 let\u2019s put the average PYLL number at a conservative 0.3 years. With about 331 million Americans, that equates to about 100 million PYLL. Taking FEE\u2019s wildly inflated US death toll of 240K from COVID-19 with an average PYLL of 10 years, that equates to only 2.4 million PYLL.<\/p>\n

Therefore, with the lockdown, the overall years of potential life lost of the general American population is almost 42X more than the most grievous COVID-19 impact case … and this is BEFORE the fallout casualties that FEE highlights.<\/p>\n

* It seems to me that the most obvious way for a government to calculate the value of a social policy is pretty simple: tax revenue versus tax expenditures. Closing off sources of tax revenue and delaying tax collection while shelling out trillions in stimulus and prolonging social security payments and increasing Medicare payments is incredibly bad for the government\u2019s bottom line. <\/p>\n

* \u2013 Not accounting for time lost by the healthy. Incredibly obvious con, but it doesn\u2019t support their predetermined pro-lockdown viewpoint so they arrogantly ignore it.<\/p>\n

\u2013 They need to subtract lives that would have been lost without the lockdown from lives that were actually lost, not just take the total (eg 120,000 \u2013 100,000 = 20,000). This is unknown.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Different people value things differently. There is no one formula because these things are unquantifiable and not interchangeable. They pretend to be experts on something they completely made up that is not independently verifiable. Yeah anyone could do that, just need to give them the power and the salary first. And you don\u2019t get that position without supporting the conclusions that the elites want you to reach.<\/p>\n

* Considering that the average age of covid related deaths in in the 70\u2019s, and that a significant number of people in their 70\u2019s and older are retired, there is little economic loss because retired people mostly consume resources, they don\u2019t produce them.<\/p>\n

In purely analytical terms, the more retired people that expire would appear to be an economic value in itself because resources and productivity are no longer required by them.<\/p>\n

* According to analysis by a Nobel prize laureate in chemistry, Covid19 has not caused any excess loss of life in Europe when viewed over a three year average. While surprising, the European all-cause mortality data supports his conclusion. Death is statistically variable. For instance, the flu season 2018-2019 was mild and fewer people died than was projected from the long-term average. The 2019-2020 flu season has been mild too. Then Covid19 came along and killed people who on average should have died over the previous 18 months. He estimates that Covid19 will increase this year\u2019s death toll by the equivalent of 3 weeks normal mortality.<\/p>\n