I noted recently that the British Government still hasn’t published a cost-benefit analysis of lockdown, more than a year after the first one was implemented. Instead, the task has been left to academics and others working outside of government, who’ve found that the costs almost certainly outweighed the benefits.
Now two economists based in Bolivia have attempted something similar at the global level. What they’ve done isn’t quite a cost-benefit analysis, as I’ll explain, but it puts the vast costs of lockdown into perspective.
Lykke Andersen and Alejandra Rocabado compared changes in the quantity and quality of life during the first year of the pandemic. They focus on a sample of 124 countries, which collectively account for 96% of the world’s official COVID-19 death toll.
To measure the quantity of life lost in 2020, the authors used the total number of excess life-years lost. And to measure the quality of life lost, they used the percentage reduction in the Google mobility index, averaged across different categories (retail, residential, etc.)
To simplify their analysis, the authors assume that “a 100% reduction in mobility for a year is equal to a lost year of life”. In other words, if average mobility fell by 20% in a country, then everyone in that country lost 1/5th of a quality life-year. This is a strong (and arguably unrealistic) assumption, but it’s useful for trying to get an overall sense of what happened.
The authors find that the world lost 48 million life-years due to people dying from COVID-19, but lost 1.25 billion quality life-years due to reductions in mobility. This means that the loss in quality of life was 25 times larger than the loss in quantity. The only three Western countries where the ratio was less than 2 were Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
How big is the 48 million number? As the authors note, “Every year, at least twice as many life years are lost due to children dying of diarrhea.” (Note that a child who dies of diarrhoea loses 50 or 60 life-years, whereas the average victim of COVID-19 loses only 5 or 10.)
One caveat is that data on excess deaths are not available for many developing countries, so in these cases the authors had to use official COVID-19 deaths, which are almost certainly undercounts. On the other hand, they used estimates of the average number of life-years lost per death that look to be on the high side. Overall, the 48 million number probably isn’t too far off the true amount.
Another point worth noting is that one can’t attribute the entirety of the 1.25 billion number to the impact of lockdowns. Some reduction in mobility would have happened anyway, due to voluntary social distancing. But even if it were cut in half, the total loss of quality life-years would still be 12.5 times larger than the loss in quantity.
Whether you buy their conclusions or not, Andersen and Rocabado’s paper is worth reading in full.
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what benefits?
I think you’ll find it’s more like a few weeks at most.
But at least we’ve got another paper stating the totally obvious.
What benefits indeed. The evidence that any measures taken led to “saving lives” is unclear, and most of it points in the other direction.
The other thing to put on the cost side of the equation is the impaired enjoyment of life going forward of vast swathes of the population who are still fearful of catching a deadly disease when the risk to them is minimal.
The quantifying of effects is notoriously difficult, but this is as good a shot as any. Deaths are an obvious measure – but even there, those due to Covid are unquantifiable, because the data is totally shot. What we do know is that all-cause mortality was high-ish in 2020 – but nothing unusual, and was picking up from anomalous low mortality in previous years – if you take a medium term historical perspective. What we do know for sure is that thee was no observable life-saving effects from lockdowns. Masks are an even bigger palliative joke, with only desperate counter-factual evidence used in support for the wild antics that we observe in pubs etc. On the other side, the overall physical and mental harms are very obvious – but not easy to quantify overall – except in certain instances such as recorded increases in suicides and mental illness. But the one thing we can say with certainty is : ‘no contest’ – except in the fevered ramblings of scientifically illiterate political self-seekers and their lackeys (so well delineated in another time by John Webster in his grasp of civil and moral corruption) – the significance seekers and the gong chasers… Read more »
Actually, in terms of one individual’s costs, we can see the imbalance.
The average victim of Covid will suffer an unpleasant viral infection for a few weeks at worst. In ‘compensation’ (!), they have lost 16 months of living.
… plus all the cost share accrued by the proportion of individuals who don’t get infected at all.
“I noted recently that the British Government still hasn’t published a cost-benefit analysis of lockdown”
Well, they are hardly likely to, are they, because they know it would not look good for them. And were they to, it would be a whitewash job. But I think they won’t, if for no other reason than it would be an admission that one was necessary, which would raise the question of why they didn’t do it sooner. I suppose they would argue there wasn’t time, because of the “emergency”. The precedent is appaling.
This is an important point. When you turn a city, region, country into a prison, people loose part of their life while being lockdown. People sent to jail are said to loose a good part of their life. So this should be considered in years of life lost due to lockdowns (not literally lost like when someone dies but close to it).
But this is just an addition to the main thing. People have died in grater numbers all over the world because of lockdowns in their country and lockdowns all over the world. Starvation, violence, deaths of despair, no routine vaccination for well-known illnesses, etc. And majority of these are children, young and middle-aged. And the future impact (next 10, 20 years…) on excess deaths (caused by 2020-21 lockdowns) will be even greater.
Remember this study from Sweden from Feb, 2021 in which they found that at the time as many people have died because of lockdowns as official covid19 deaths.
And lockdown deaths were predominantly among younger.
https://www.gp.se/nyheter/v%C3%A4rlden/lika-m%C3%A5nga-har-d%C3%B6tt-av-restriktionerna-som-corona-1.42197982
Lose.
They won’t do a cost benefit analysis because they know it wouldn’t even pass the crude test of Utilitarian ethics.
And this from a government that boasts the usual over-supply of Oxbridge PPE’s.
1st class arseholes.
There’s also a question of liability. If the govt have done the cost/benefit analysis and made a conscious decision, that’s much harder to defend than saying the evidence wasn’t available and so they had to rely on the opinions of ‘experts’ as a result. Teflon all the way.
Good point
Reductions in Quality of Life- all going according to plan then…
Doctors Say NO to Medical Tyranny – Dr. Roger Hodkinson, an outspoken Canadian pathologist and the doctor who took on BIG TOBACCO, now leading DOCTORS SAY NO to COVID tyranny, and Dr. Michael Yeadon, former Senior VP for Pfizer as Chief Scientist for the worldwide Respiratory and Allergic Disease Unit, now bringing critical medical information on COVID Vaccine risks to help save lives.
https://americaoutloud.com/doctors-say-no-to-medical-tyranny/
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One conjecture I have come up with for the COVID measures, is that the elites (for lack of a better word) want to collapse the world economy to create their world government. So, they are using every means to solidify power and wealth in their hands whilst instituting instruments of control. Thus when the inevitable collapse happens they can maintain control and not be unseated by revolution. They get left with it all and an army of human cattle to do their bidding. Billions will most likely die in a few years time, many of starvation. The economic collapse has probably been inevitable, they are not unusal but usually focused on one country at a time. This time it will be global. The economic problem might arguably be traced all the way back to the dropping of the gold standard by Nixon, maybe to fund the Vietnam war. The real rot started around the 2008 recession where many badly managed banks and financial organisations were saved that perhaps should have been allowed to fail and the dreaded money printing accelerated. Debt has been growing faster than income and it seems counter intuitive to think that can last forever. It has… Read more »
Surely if the govt won’t, the people could? Same for the inevitable rigged inquiries. The only difference is that they have organised where the people have not.
It has gone beyond the point of cost benefit – Covid is now a paradigm – like orthodox religions or cults – it relies on pure symbolism to show true belief (in an abstract and unprovable entity). There is no link between reality and these symbols (masks, PCR testing, social distancing and lockdowns). The vaccines are a baptism in holy water mixed with a bit of poison to save your mortal soul from purgatory ( even if you get injured or die). By refusing you will be outcast. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It’s the wrong comparison though. It’s not lives lost, it’s lives SAVED by lockdown which imo is MUCH lower than the excess deaths due to Covid. I can never find the original Ferguson prediction of 510K deaths with nothing done compared to a few thousand under lockdown. Arguably that was the worst part of the prediction as it was clearly nonsense.
I think the other side of the equation is vastly over-estimated too, and also forgets the lives lost due to lockdown effects rather than Covid, but 2 wrongs don’t make a right and this sort of comparison doesn’t help our lockdown-sceptic cause.
We really shouldn’t need research to provide us with a statement of the bleedin obvious. They have certainly fucked up my life and lots of people have had it far worse than me.
Both the government and the opposition have set their faces against anything as logical or sensible as assessing the detrimental effects of their policies. This is something they have all been working up to for years. Covid has simply provided an opportunity too good to pass up and no amount of evidence or common sense will cut through.