The costs of COVID-19
2020-04-23 18:11:17.940003+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
So a common theme with the astroturfing campaign is that the human lives lost from the economic downturn we're going through, and will continue to go through, are worse than those we'd see with COVID-19. Let's dig into that a little bit.
American Journal of Public Health: Impact of Business Cycles on US Suicide Rates, 1928–2007 (doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2010.300010) suggests that death rate due to suicides during the Great Depression went from 18 per 100,000 to 22 per 100,000. So given the same rate of increase in suicides from such an economic situation at the current population, we could expect to see 13,000 additional deaths.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare that to COVID-19 deaths. Especially since looking at overall mortality rates suggest that the official statistics on COVID-19 related deaths are super low (eg: Santa Clara County death data shows 20% increase in March, suggesting more coronavirus victims than previously known — The numbers show a significant uptick in fatalities compared to a year earlier, including a 17% rise in the number of people who died at home.
The EPA has been hedging their bets on "statistical value of a life" for years, but it's a good back of the envelope, and inflation adjusted it comes out to about $9.6M in 2019 dollars, so call it an even $10M. Just pulling numbers that have come out, assume 70% of the population is susceptible, 1.8% death rate, that's a little over 4 million people, so $40T. Now unless Remdesivir is a miracle, or something else comes along, that may be inevitable, but unless we flatten the curve it's not unreasonable to assume that that death rate would double.
We're now learning that there are likely a lot of super-negative long-term health effects, and no indication of what immunity rates look like.
Of course we know a lot more about psychology and economics now, and with a well-coordinated Federal response we can mitigate a lot of those issues.
But, of course, "well-coordinated Federal response" and the fuckwit clowns in the Executive branch right now...
All because a small minority of cosplayers with expensive props are pissed off about missing out on their free iced tea refills.