Shutting down major sectors of the economy was a drastic measure to try and prevent the spread of Covid-19. But was it worth the expense in terms of lives saved? Let's do an admittedly crude comparison. The leading causes of death this year, in rough decreasing order, will be heart disease, cancer, accidents, lung disease, Covid, stroke, and Alzheimers. For a fair comparison, we need to know the expected number of deaths and the cost to society of measures taken to prevent statistical deaths. We do not include individual treatments, as most of those costs are borne by the afflicted families after the fact, or through insurance payments, and are not as relevant for public policy. For most of the leading causes, it is difficult to estimate the costs, but we have a nice metric for cancer and Alzheimers, where we can use annual research and deaths from previous years. For Covid, an accurate measure of lost productivity due to the lockdown would be the loss of GDP. This has been estimated at $15T or more, but it is hard to pin down. We will be extra conservative and use the $2T stimulus for a rough order of magnitude.
Cancer deaths: 600k
Cancer research expense: $50B (private big pharma)
Cancer research expense: $5B (federal research)
Cost per death: $90k
Alzheimer's deaths 120k
Alzheimers research expense $3B
Cost per death: $25k
Covid deaths 145k (to date)
Covid response expense $2T
Cost per death: $13M
Here it is in a chart:
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