JPNZ:
frankv:
What's the economic value of a life?
Thats the basic question.
But, whats your opinion on the way forward then?
NZTA uses a value of $4.73M when deciding whether an improvement to road safety is worthwhile or not. However, there are some who say that's low, even far too low. Let's go with that though. So it makes economic sense to spend $47M to save 10 lives, or $290M per day to save 61 lives per day. But lockdowns are relatively short, let's say 30 days per year, so annual cost = $8.7B = 1839 lives. So a 1 month lockdown makes sense if it saves 1,839 lives in a year, or about 5 per day.
April 14 2020 NZ peaked at 4 covid deaths, but of course by then the outbreak was well under control by lockdown (obviously deaths lag after infections by a week or two). I have no doubt that if we hadn't locked down in March/April, there would have been a great deal more than 5 deaths per day until eventually we did lock down.
So locking down was better than doing nothing. Whilst spending less money by investing in ICU beds would have been cheaper, it wasn't (and isn't) possible.