How long do we expect to have to wait for a vaccine or much more effective treatment?
I can’t think of a better source on this than the Good Judgment project’s COVID-19 recovery dashboard.
How does the economic and related damage vary for voluntary vs involuntary suppression?
This is incredibly complicated and country-specific and dependent on all sorts of factors but maybe this graph from the Financial Times is a good place to start, it tells us how things have gone so far.
How does the total number and spread of infections vary for voluntary vs involuntary suppression?
This is even harder than the previous question. ‘All we can say for sure is “It was possible to get R<1 in Sweden in the spring with less stringent measures’. If you consider that Sweden suffered considerably more death than its comparable neighbours, then you can project that the initial surge in deaths in badly-hit locked down countries like the UK could have been much higher with voluntary measures, but how much higher is difficult to assess. I think that between-country comparisons are almost useless in these situations.
This is also where accounting for coronavirus deaths and debilitations comes into play. ‘Anti-lockdown’ arguments sometimes focus on the fact that even in badly-hit countries, the excess death figures have been in the rough range of +10%, (though with around 11 years of life lost). There are ways of describing this that make it seem ‘not so bad’ or ‘not worth shutting the country down for’, by e.g. comparing it to deaths from the other leading causes of death, like heart disease. This assumes there’s a direct tradeoff where we can ‘carry on as normal’ while accepting those deaths and avoid the economic damage, but there is no such tradeoff to be made. There’s just the choice as to which way you place the additional nudges of law and public messaging on top of a trajectory you’re largely committed to by individual behaviour changes.
And if you do try to make the impossible, hypothetical ‘tradeoff economy and lives’ comparison between ‘normal behaviour no matter what’ and virus suppression, then the number of excess deaths to use for comparison isn’t the number we in fact suffered, but far higher, given the IFR of 0.5-1%, it’s on the order of +100% excess deaths (600,000 in the UK and 2 million in the US).
But again, such a comparison isn’t useful, as it’s not a policy that could be enacted or adopted, in fact it would probably require huge state coercion to force people to return to ‘normal life’.
The basic point that it wouldn’t be worth sacrificing everything to reduce excess deaths by 10% and save a million life-years is true, but that point is turned into a motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that there exists a level of damage at which a particular suppression measure (full lockdowns) is no longer worth it, and the bailey is that in all the situations we are in now most suppression measures are not worth it.
To what degree do weaker legally mandated measures earlier spare us from stronger legally mandated measures (or greater economic damage from voluntary behaviour change) later?
This raises the difficult question of how much to take into account panic over overwhelmed hospitals and rising cases. Tyler Cowen:
In that sense, as things stand, there is no “normal” to be found. An attempt to pursue it would most likely lead to panic over the numbers of cases and hospitalizations, and would almost certainly make a second lockdown more likely.
How long do we expect to have to wait for a vaccine or much more effective treatment?
I can’t think of a better source on this than the Good Judgment project’s COVID-19 recovery dashboard.
How does the economic and related damage vary for voluntary vs involuntary suppression?
This is incredibly complicated and country-specific and dependent on all sorts of factors but maybe this graph from the Financial Times is a good place to start, it tells us how things have gone so far.
How does the total number and spread of infections vary for voluntary vs involuntary suppression?
This is even harder than the previous question. ‘All we can say for sure is “It was possible to get R<1 in Sweden in the spring with less stringent measures’. If you consider that Sweden suffered considerably more death than its comparable neighbours, then you can project that the initial surge in deaths in badly-hit locked down countries like the UK could have been much higher with voluntary measures, but how much higher is difficult to assess. I think that between-country comparisons are almost useless in these situations.
This is also where accounting for coronavirus deaths and debilitations comes into play. ‘Anti-lockdown’ arguments sometimes focus on the fact that even in badly-hit countries, the excess death figures have been in the rough range of +10%, (though with around 11 years of life lost). There are ways of describing this that make it seem ‘not so bad’ or ‘not worth shutting the country down for’, by e.g. comparing it to deaths from the other leading causes of death, like heart disease. This assumes there’s a direct tradeoff where we can ‘carry on as normal’ while accepting those deaths and avoid the economic damage, but there is no such tradeoff to be made. There’s just the choice as to which way you place the additional nudges of law and public messaging on top of a trajectory you’re largely committed to by individual behaviour changes.
And if you do try to make the impossible, hypothetical ‘tradeoff economy and lives’ comparison between ‘normal behaviour no matter what’ and virus suppression, then the number of excess deaths to use for comparison isn’t the number we in fact suffered, but far higher, given the IFR of 0.5-1%, it’s on the order of +100% excess deaths (600,000 in the UK and 2 million in the US).
But again, such a comparison isn’t useful, as it’s not a policy that could be enacted or adopted, in fact it would probably require huge state coercion to force people to return to ‘normal life’.
The basic point that it wouldn’t be worth sacrificing everything to reduce excess deaths by 10% and save a million life-years is true, but that point is turned into a motte-and-bailey, where the motte is that there exists a level of damage at which a particular suppression measure (full lockdowns) is no longer worth it, and the bailey is that in all the situations we are in now most suppression measures are not worth it.
To what degree do weaker legally mandated measures earlier spare us from stronger legally mandated measures (or greater economic damage from voluntary behaviour change) later?
This raises the difficult question of how much to take into account panic over overwhelmed hospitals and rising cases. Tyler Cowen: