The World Bank now forecasts an that COVID-19 will push 88 million to 115 million people into poverty in 2020. Extreme poverty in this case is defined as living on $1.90 or less per day. This is the first reversal in global poverty in decades taking us back 3 years. The change in trend is very sharp, see figure on page 5.
Many of the new poor are in the urban informal sector, where government redistribution is unlikely to help. The world bank report stresses government interventions in poor countries, but the informal sector is hard to reach (unregistered, less politically powerful, less organized).
Some of these mechanisms are intensified by lockdown policies. The World Bank's report scrupulously avoid that connection, but I suspect it is important. Disambiguating between rich-country lockdowns and poor country lockdowns is important.
Much of the effect comes from the contraction of global gdp of 5-8 percent. To the extent that lockdowns increase the GDP reduction, they contributed to the loss. The decisions of the wealthiest countries to lockdown contracted demand for tourism and manufactured goods. South-Asian exporters like India, Bangladesh and Indonesia come up repeatedly in the report. Also the new poor are more urban and formerly worked in tourism and manufacturing. This suggests that western consumer choices contributed to the increase. Probably a minority of total change, roughly.
Like in west, service workers have the least education. They got hit the hardest by lockdowns in counries like India and Ethiopia. Millions of Indian migrant workers had to migrate by foot in one crazy week in India. Documented events along indicate hundreds of deaths. Malnutrition likely the biggest killer. Kids have a lot if QALY's left.
Back of the envelope calculation. Let's assume the increase in poverty is 110 Million. It's unclear when he affect washes out over time, but let's say that it persists for 5 years. Currently 40% of the extreme poor in SSA and south Asia are 0-14. Over five years, the number of children who will go through the dangerous begining of life will be
110 x 10^6 x .4 x .33 = 15 x 10^6 additional children growing from 0 to 5 in extreme poverty.
A cursory look at OWID's child mortality and income plots suggests the change in child mortality is about 5%. So assume that an 5% additional counterfactual deaths. Assume 70 QALY's per child.
5 x 10^6 x .05 x 70 = 54 * 10^6 lost QALYs
Then also assume that lockdowns caused 1/4 of the increase in global poverty. Just a guess.
54 x 10^5 / 4 = 13 x 10^6 lost QALYs from lockdowns.
Given my high uncertainties, 1.3 to 130 QALY's is a 95% range.
This only includes from those people that crossed the magic line at $1.9 / day. Non-extreme poverty also increased.
Building on your statement that many of the affected will be hard to reach with aid payments: some study on just what amount of government redistribution is actually helpful might also be in order. Redistribution may solve the immediately obvious problems of people being suddenly unemployed, but it also slows the economy's ability to adapt to the significantly changed environment. So there's undoubtedly a crossover point where it hurts more than it helps in the long run.
Not that I expect most governments would pay any attention at all if somebody did work up a number or a formula, but being able to see which nations come closest to hitting it could be entertaining.
Claim: The decrease in driving during the lock down has significantly increased air quality (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-covid19-air-pollution-enviroment-nature-lockdown) , saving many lives. Seeing as we're dealing with a respiratory disease, the increase in air quality has probably saved even more lives than it would otherwise.
Lock downs have led to significant decreases in seasonal influenza in the Southern Hemisphere.
An important consideration is that the 'thing that the US, UK and China have been doing, and what Sweden didn’t', may not refer to anything. There are two meanings of 'lockdowns have not been worth it' - 'allow the natural herd immunity to happen and carry on as normal, accepting the direct health damage while saving the economy' or 'we shouldn't adopt legally mandatory measures to attempt to suppress the virus and instead adopt voluntary measures to attempt to suppress the virus'. The latter of these is the only correct way to interpret 'thing Sweden did that the other countries didn't'. The first of these is basically a thought-experiment, not a possible state of affairs, because people won't carry on as usual. So it can't be used for cost-benefit comparisons.
In terms of behaviour, there is far more similarity between what the US and Sweden 'did' than what the US and China 'did'. Tyler Cowen has written several articles emphasising exactly this point. What Sweden 'did' was an uncoordinated, voluntary attempt at the same policy that China, Germany, the UK and the US attempted with varying levels of seriousness - social distancing to reduce the R effectively below 1, suppressing the epidemic. This thread summarizes the 'voluntary suppression' that countries like Sweden ended up with. Tyler Cowen writes an article attempting to 'right the wrong question':
"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection."
What exactly does the word “allow” mean in this context? Again the passivity is evident, as if humans should just line up in the proper order of virus exposure and submit to nature’s will. How about instead we channel our inner Ayn Rand and stress the role of human agency? Something like: “Herd immunity will come from a combination of exposure to the virus through natural infection and the widespread use of vaccines. Here are some ways to maximize the role of vaccines in that process.”
So, the question cannot be "should we allow the natural herd immunity to happen and carry on as normal, accepting the direct health damage while protecting the economy" - that is not actually a possible state of affairs given human behaviour. We can ask whether a better overall outcome is achieved with legally required measures to attempt suppression, rather than an uncoordinated attempt at suppression, but since people will not carry on as normal we can't ask 'has the economic/knock-on cost of lockdowns been worth the lives saved' without being very clear that the counterfactual may not be all that different.
The most important considerations have to be,
To emphasise this last point, although it falls under 'questioning the question', the focus on Lockdowns can be counterproductive when there are vastly more cost-effective measures that could have been attempted by countries like the UK that had very low caseloads through the summer - like funding enforcement and support for isolation and better contact tracing, mask enforcement, and keeping events outdoors. These may fall under some people's definition of 'lockdown' since some of them are legally mandatory social distancing, but their costs and benefits are wildly different from stay-at-home orders. Scepticism of 'Lockdowns' must be defined to be more specific.
I can't think of a better source on this than the Good Judgment project's COVID-19 recovery dashboard.
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.
A spreadsheet model I made investigates the trade-off between lost life-years from covid-19 deaths versus lost life-years from reduced quality of life being locked down. You can make a copy of it and play with the various parameters.
The spreadsheet uses real data about the mortality risk from covid-19 and the population structure (life expectancy, population pyramid) for the USA.
With the parameters that I chose, lockdowns of 1.25 years destroy about 0.25 life-years per person on net.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wBcHkt9i_4hGSXRrqurr82j-R_X03nyr_Eds6YLjkzc/
If there was a strictly enforced lockdown for 2-4 weeks, it seems likely that:
A potential downside is setting a precedent for too much governmental power. I don't feel strongly about that but I suspect that the benefit of the government having such power outweighs the cost.
I'm skeptical of this.
I agree (given the negative score of your comment) that this is a bit out of topic, or that it should be reframed to fit the given problematic.
But I wanted to extend my sympathies to you. I lost 2 amazing grand-parents during the first lockdown. Couldn't see them during the weeks they were ill. I was lucky to be able to get a few minutes with the coffins before they got cremated. That period was very rough for all of my family. Good luck, I hope you and your father get out of this safe and sound.
(Just a note that this overall seems fairly fine as a comment and not an answer, which you did. Defying the rules in the comments isn't generally good, but I did appreciate reading this comment, it did help me think a bit more clearly about how the lockdown affects families.)
Also, I'm sorry you don't get to see your dad.
By ‘lockdown’ we refer to the thing that the US, UK and China have been doing, and what Sweden and Italy didn’t
It seemed to me that Italy (after the initially hit areas were pretty much saturated) did a much harder lockdown than much of the US has been doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_lockdown_in_Italy
By ‘lockdown’ we refer to the thing that the US, UK and China have been doing, and what Sweden didn’t.
You should also mention that the approach in the US is not uniform.
Although many states had blanket lockdowns, some were a patchwork of rules, with cities and counties mandating their own restrictions.
Also, a hard lockdown demonstrated to be very useful to flatten the curve in New York.
Sweden’s GDP fared worse than Norway’s and Finland’s, with greater loss of human life to boot. Denmark‘s economy has fared similar to Sweden, perhaps a bit worse even, but with much less loss of life.
It’s an evolving situation, but at this point, yes the lockdowns appear to have been worth it both for economic benefits and loss of life. Swedens strategy, thus far, has led to greater loss of life as well as no economic payoff.
Lockdown incentivized politicians to establish positions on a lockdown, which has led to people having strong opinions about it. Even assuming no damage from further polarization, we have a roughly 50% chance of having an anti-lockdown government when the next pandemic hits, with a 10% chance of this new incentive being the deciding factor in not enacting a lockdown (or failing to implement it). Even if we assume that only 10% of the effects of this polarization is the result of the lockdown actually happening, with a 1% yearly chance of a pandemic more dangerous in expectation than the current one (~100M dead), we have ~1M QALYs lost, extrapolated worldwide over the next 10 years (while this effect is most pronounced).
Note: This is just a quick check to see that the effect is at least plausibly on an order of magnitude worth taking into consideration. I'm only somewhat confident that the effect isn't in the opposite direction. I'm only commenting (as opposed to answering) because primarily I expect weak points in my general process of speculation pointed out, not because I believe this to be well-informed enough to be useful.
I mean, a lot of it I think has to do with the lockdown rules being fairly obviously being written by the dumbest people in the room.
As a couple of examples, here where I am they shut down all "nonessential" jobs and it rapidly became clear that they had no idea what was actually essential and no idea what actually spread the virus. Specifically:
Automotive repair shops were shut down entirely for months. It's as if they had no conception that all those "essential" transport jobs to get food back to the stores actually have to do vehicle maintenance. It wasn't until shipping started to take a hit that they actually listened to complaints.
"non-essential" rural workers taking advantage of the down time to catch up on maintenance were having jack-booted thugs show up on their property (in the middle of nowhere, with no workers who didn't live on-premises) and order them to cease working and go sit inside their homes because somehow that would make everyone safer. Never mind that these people's only possible exposure would have been coming directly from the aforementioned jackboots.
Logging and mining operations that go weeks on end with little to no outside contact ordered to shut down and send all their people home, despite the fact that those people were almost certainly at less risk of exposure working in a remote region than back in the city or town.
I expect it'll be less an anti-lockdown backlash than an anti-idiot backlash. But people may have a hard time differentiating the two.
Hanson's quite compelling post on the subject. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/10/we-are-over-preventing-covid.html
If lockdown reduces the quality of life of the population by 10% (conservative estimate IMHO), then each month of lockdown for a country with a population of 60M corresponds to 60M * 0.1 = 6M months = 500k QALYs lost. The average number of life expectancy years lost for a death by COVID is estimated to be ~10 years so 50k COVID deaths ~= 500k QALYs lost. This means that in a population of 60M you need to expect to be saving 50k COVID deaths every single month of lockdown just to break even and this is using a conservative estimate of the reduction in quality of life and ignores all other factors such as the damage to the economy, impact on third world countries etc. Currently the worst hit country in the world is Peru with a death rate of ~0.1% of the population which would correspond to 60k deaths in a population of 60M. 60k deaths corresponds to a little over a month of lockdown reduced QALYs in this analysis.
This seems to be only counting the direct QALYs lost from deaths, but not the grief and general disruption that the dead people's loved ones suffer? Nor the lowered quality of life to people who survive, but suffer long-term damage.
The average number of life expectancy years lost for a death by COVID is estimated to be ~10 years so 50k COVID deaths ~= 500k QALYs lost.
Where did this number come from?
The life expectancy of a 65 years old man is 19 years.
Source: Life Expectancy Calculator
Now, you must consider that Peru managed to reduce their death rate to ~0.1% with a lockdown. The situation is terrible but it could have been worse -- if they didn't act.
So: your analysis is minimizing the cost of a death and failing to take into account the reduction in the number of deaths thanks to the lockdown.
Here's an example paper estimating the number of years of life expectancy lost is ~10 years.
https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pubmed/fdaa159/5901977
Note that in the UK for example the average age of COVID deaths is around 80 with many of those from care homes where their life expectancy is particularly low. This statistic makes the figure of ~10 years of life expectancy lost fairly plausible.
I read this today and I found it a great resource. Not necessarily and answer to your question, but relevant.
We all know the success of New Zealand's lock down. This case study explains in detail the steps New Zealand took at a national level to achieve its success.
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the pandemic lockdowns have been worth it. However, much of the reasoning that we’ve seen has been very motivated and un-nuanced in a way that for us has distorted a lot of the information.
So this is not a thread for taking a position on that. This is a thread for raising individual considerations that are relevant for thinking about the question “Have the pandemic lockdowns, in general, been worth it?”
Every answer to this thread should analyze a single belief that is relevant to whether pandemic lockdowns have been worth it, such as
and provide relevant facts, data and information available about that factor.
Answers in this thread should not attempt to take a position on the overall question. Answers that take a position on the overall question will be deleted. This thread will live up to the virtue of holding off on proposing solutions.
(By ‘lockdown’ we refer to the thing that the US, UK and China have been doing, and what Sweden didn’t. There is naturally a lot of variation between countries, so this cannot have a canonical answer. If your consideration only applies to a small number of countries, that is fine.)
