surviving COVID might cost a lot of QALYs from permanent lung and brain damage. It might also cost a lot of future expected earnings for the same reason.
I hear this objection a lot but don’t have a sense of how likely/how bad “permanent lung/brain damage” is—do you happen to have any sources? I think this scenario is in the public conciousness because it’s scary and newsworthy, not because it’s common. Randomly guessing I’d say that permanent damage is meaningful in ~1% of all cases?
I tried to factor this already into my $1k - $10k COVID avoidance price, but I’d be happy to update on new data, and of course you might have different subjective valuations.
Also, don’t forget to factor in “kicking off a chain of onwards infections” into your COVID avoidance price somehow. You can’t stop at valuing “cost of COVID to *me*”.
Running the “microCOVID to $” conversion from the other end of the spectrum, the recommendation of 1% COVID risk = 10k μCoV to spend/year would suggest a conversion rate of $1 per μCoV (if your yearly discretionary budget is on the order of $10k/year).
I keep coming back to the “dollars conversion” because there’s a very real sense in which we’re trained our entire lives to evaluate how to price things in dollars; if I tell you a meal costs $25 you have an instant sense of whether that’s cheap or outrageous. Since we don’t have a similar fine-tuned model for risk, piggybacking one on the other could be a good way to build intuition faster.
I keep coming back to the “dollars conversion” because there’s a very real sense in which we’re trained our entire lives to evaluate how to price things in dollars; if I tell you a meal costs $25 you have an instant sense of whether that’s cheap or outrageous. Since we don’t have a similar fine-tuned model for risk, piggybacking one on the other could be a good way to build intuition faster.
That’s a great way to put it. And since the goal of the microCOVID project is behavior change (presumably), I think it’s crucial to get the “have an instant sense of whether it’s cheap or outrageous” part right. Without that I fear that only the most committed people would be motivated enough to change their behavior, but a lot of those people are probably being cautious to begin with.
Anecdotally, I was talking to my brother (not super committed) about it last night, and that data point supported what I’m saying.
One way to bound the risk of long term consequences is to assume the long term consequences will be less severe than the infection itself. So if 1% of people in their 20′s experience reduced lung capacity during infection, you can assume that less than 1% will have permanently reduced lung capacity. I have never heard of a disease which was worse after you recover than before.
I suspect that some people are hesitant to discuss the rate of long term consequences for young covid patients for fear of encouraging people not to social distance. But then the cost is a loss of trust between people and the information provider.
Interesting. The study discusses fatigue. Do we know if the fatigue is caused by reduced lung capacity or by the hormones/neuro stuff our body does to conserve energy while sick. If reduced lung capacity is a big part of that 1⁄5 I would update upward on permanent lung capacity rate.
surviving COVID might cost a lot of QALYs from permanent lung and brain damage. It might also cost a lot of future expected earnings for the same reason.
I hear this objection a lot but don’t have a sense of how likely/how bad “permanent lung/brain damage” is—do you happen to have any sources? I think this scenario is in the public conciousness because it’s scary and newsworthy, not because it’s common. Randomly guessing I’d say that permanent damage is meaningful in ~1% of all cases?
I tried to factor this already into my $1k - $10k COVID avoidance price, but I’d be happy to update on new data, and of course you might have different subjective valuations.
Also, don’t forget to factor in “kicking off a chain of onwards infections” into your COVID avoidance price somehow. You can’t stop at valuing “cost of COVID to *me*”.
We don’t really know how to do this properly yet, but see discussion here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MACKemu3CJw7hcJcN/microcovid-org-a-tool-to-estimate-covid-risk-from-common?commentId=v4mEAeehi4d6qXSHo#No5yn8nves7ncpmMt
Good point, thanks.
Running the “microCOVID to $” conversion from the other end of the spectrum, the recommendation of 1% COVID risk = 10k μCoV to spend/year would suggest a conversion rate of $1 per μCoV (if your yearly discretionary budget is on the order of $10k/year).
I keep coming back to the “dollars conversion” because there’s a very real sense in which we’re trained our entire lives to evaluate how to price things in dollars; if I tell you a meal costs $25 you have an instant sense of whether that’s cheap or outrageous. Since we don’t have a similar fine-tuned model for risk, piggybacking one on the other could be a good way to build intuition faster.
That’s a great way to put it. And since the goal of the microCOVID project is behavior change (presumably), I think it’s crucial to get the “have an instant sense of whether it’s cheap or outrageous” part right. Without that I fear that only the most committed people would be motivated enough to change their behavior, but a lot of those people are probably being cautious to begin with.
Anecdotally, I was talking to my brother (not super committed) about it last night, and that data point supported what I’m saying.
Sadly nothing useful. As mentioned here (https://www.microcovid.org/paper/2-riskiness#fn6) we think it’s not higher than 10%, but we haven’t found anything to bound it further.
One way to bound the risk of long term consequences is to assume the long term consequences will be less severe than the infection itself. So if 1% of people in their 20′s experience reduced lung capacity during infection, you can assume that less than 1% will have permanently reduced lung capacity. I have never heard of a disease which was worse after you recover than before.
I suspect that some people are hesitant to discuss the rate of long term consequences for young covid patients for fear of encouraging people not to social distance. But then the cost is a loss of trust between people and the information provider.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm found that ~1 in 5 of 18-34 year olds with no underlying health conditions had symptoms 3 weeks later (telephone survey of people who’d been symptomatic and had a positive test).
Other discussion in comments of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ahYxBHLmG7TiGDqxG/do-we-have-updated-data-about-the-risk-of-permanent-chronic
Interesting. The study discusses fatigue. Do we know if the fatigue is caused by reduced lung capacity or by the hormones/neuro stuff our body does to conserve energy while sick. If reduced lung capacity is a big part of that 1⁄5 I would update upward on permanent lung capacity rate.