A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.
Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and definitively conveys the true costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Accordingly, Revolver News set out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.
The COVID-19 lockdown measures that Americans have had to endure for the greater part of 2020 represent one of the most dramatic, consequential, and damaging policy measures undertaken in this nation’s history. For the first time in its history, America has experienced a situation so crippling and perilous that long term financial and social stability have been legitimately threatened.
As with everything in 2020 America, these lockdown measures have become deeply politicized. President Trump opposes further devastating lockdowns. In his recent Republican National Convention speech, President Trump raised the point that lockdowns have had very real and very devastating effects on the lives of many Americans.
President Trump: “The cost of the Biden shutdown would be measured in increased drug overdoses, depression, alcohol addiction, suicides, heart attacks, economic devastation, job loss and much more. Joe Biden’s plan is not a solution to the virus, but, rather, it’s a surrender to the virus.” [Politico]
Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden, by contrast, has suggested that he is willing to impose further lockdowns if “scientists” tell him to do so. It is unclear which scientists Joe Biden would be listening to, as there is no consensus among scientists and experts as to whether or not lockdowns are worth the staggering costs they impose on the common man.
“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” @JoeBiden told @davidmuir Friday of the country, to stop the spread of COVID-19, in his first joint interview alongside his running mate, @KamalaHarris.
— Molly Nagle (@MollyNagle3) August 21, 2020
Revolver News is very proud to present a rigorous study on such an important topic and we hope that this will be spread far and wide both within government and without to assist policymakers. This exclusive study is a collaborative guest contribution to Revolver News. Due to the unfortunately politicized nature of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and the associated plausibility of professional repercussions, the authors have chosen for the time being to represent themselves pseudonymously.
Abel Sumner is a Ph.D. candidate in a social sciences field with both private and public sector experience as a policymaker. He is extensively trained in statistics, econometrics, and quantitatively informed public policy.
Jeremiah Jackson holds a Ph.D. in economics and has experience both in the public sector as a policy maker and in the private sector as an analyst.
Jacob Cage holds a Ph.D. in a social sciences field and has extensive experience both in the public and private sectors in policy analysis and strategic communications.
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CHEAT SHEET: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations Show COVID-19 “Cure” Is Worse Than Disease
- Standard approaches to evaluating epidemic policy responses, involving the Value of a Statistical Life, have conceptual problems and are biased towards the elderly and rich.
- Using a life-years criterion as an alternative shows that the lockdowns cost an order of magnitude more life-years than they saved.
- Most of the publicized cost-benefit analyses of COVID-19 lockdowns have used coarse measures like lives as units rather than life-years, which misleads politicians and the general public. COVID-19 deaths disproportionately impact the oldest members of the population, whereas the economic impacts of lockdowns disproportionately harm the youngest of the working population, who have far greater life expectancies at the time of impact.
- Using prior research on workforce entrants and recent graduates entering into a market marred by an economic recession, empirical estimates of life-years lost can be determined. Extensive research on job displacement can be used to estimate the economic impact in life-years of starkly increased unemployment for mid-to-late career workers.
- Combining these analyses, we found that an estimated 18.7 million life-years will be lost in the United States due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. Comparative data analysis between nations shows that the lockdowns in the United States likely had a minimal effect in saving life-years. Using two different comparison groups, we estimate that the COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.S. saved between a quarter to three quarters of a million life-years.
- Every broad age category lost life-years from the lockdowns including those 55 and older.
- The media and state and local governments contributed to the panic by selectively presenting evidence on COVID-19 and shutdowns of dubious benefit.
- Public health researchers and health economists gave poor policy advice and made selective use of the prior research literature. They will likely be rewarded, not punished, by academia for their failure because of academia’s biases.
- Public health in general is so biased and vulnerable to motivated cognition that it is not “not yet ready for policy analysis.”
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Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations Show COVID-19 “Cure” Is Worse Than Disease
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially classified COVID-19 as a global pandemic. In the following weeks, the countries of the world began implementing previously unthinkable measures to prevent the spread of the virus. In the United States, some states quickly locked down nearly all physical businesses, venues, and public areas. As a short quarantine rapidly grew into an indefinite lockdown, some lawmakers and economists began asking if the lockdowns would cause more damage than the virus itself. Using empirical research, first-pass estimates can be made about the impact of the unprecedented lockdown in life-years lost. This can then be compared to the number to the estimated life-years lost to COVID-19 in the United States.
Why life-years? It is well-known that socioeconomic status (SES) appears to be linked to life expectancy and some of that association is causal, with higher SESes causing longer life expectancies through a number of channels. Most government policy analysts make decisions using the Value of a Statistical Life (VSLs) — which is about $10 million. If a regulation can save 1 life and costs $9 million, for instance, then it’s worth imposing to save a life. If it costs $11 million, then it’s not worth imposing to save a life. A problem with this approach is how coarse it is. Because SES is linked to life expectancies, actions by the government that do not result in direct loss of life are liable to being simply unaccounted for in this approach. For example, why not set the VSL at $100 million? Or $1? If you set the VSL too low, you will fail to impose many very cheap lifesaving regulations. Something perhaps more subtle is that if you set the VSL too high, then regulations you impose will reduce income so much by retarding economic activity that you will wind up reducing life expectancies through the SES-life expectancy channel. There are actually more fundamental issues with the use of a single VSL for all citizens (see Sunstein’s Valuing Life for a good overview), but many find the general equilibrium problems with it very intuitive.
Surprisingly, the COVID-19 conversation among public health analysts, bio-statisticians, economists, and policymakers who are otherwise sensitive to the problems with VSL has been dominated by the standard “coarse” VSL calculation above. We have seen no full policy analyses utilizing life-year approaches, although various studies have tried to estimate the average life-year losses per COVID-19 death. Controversy over estimating the correct value of a statistical life, problems with actually applying it in analysis as described above, and perhaps a certain odiousness associated with the rendering of human lives in dollar terms have pushed some health economists and public health analysts toward use of a life-years approach. This approach is simple, and in principle, involves no explicit conversion of human lives into money terms — although such a trade-off is implicit in any policy analysis. From the life-years’ perspective, a policymaker can compute the life-years lost and gained if they take a specific action. For instance, a new airline safety regulation may make users of airlines so safe that they save an average of 0.1 life-years per traveler, but the higher cost of air travel may induce potential passengers to switch to less safe car travel, costing the switchers an average of 0.3 life-years. If enough people switch to car travel, then the airline safety regulation will actually reduce the total life-years lived from the perspective of the transportation system as a whole.
A life-year maximizer would say that the regulation should not be adopted. An advantage of the life-year approach is that it values all people’s life-years equally in principle. The life-year of an 80 year old is of equal value to that of a 20 year old. The life-year of a poor person is worth the same as the life-year of a rich person. The VSL method, by incorrectly estimating the amount that heterogenous consumers and workers are willing to pay for safety, may privilege the wealthy (who place a higher premium on safety) and the elderly (who will not have to face the “general equilibrium” costs of more safety regulations) over the poor and the young, who might prefer less safe but much cheaper goods and services or higher paying, but unsafe jobs over lower paying, but safe jobs. With life-years now established as our operational metric, we shall proceed with our analysis of the life-year impacts of Covid lockdown policies.
The COVID-19 lockdowns have resulted in a massive global recession, which has spared almost no country, firm, or economic sector. Job displacement in America has occurred at a scale nearly rivaling that of the Great Depression in the 1930s, with unemployment as high as 14.7% in April of 2020. Using a back-of-the envelope calculation, we can lower-bound the medium-term increase in unemployment, which can reasonably be estimated at around 8.5%. It is important to note that even medium-term unemployment will result in permanent job separations, as employees who are unemployed for over a year are unlikely to return to their previous position.
Figure 1
Previous research on job displacement and mortality has found that displaced workers face a significant increase in mortality rates, from which lost years of life can be estimated.[1] Job losses and permanent job separations have been shown to correlate directly with increases in heart disease, drug overdoses, lung cancer, and liver disease, among other factors of increased mortality risk. Sullivan and Von Watcher’s paper on job displacement and mortality estimated that job separation results in about 1.5 lost life-years per individual…
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