Deconfinement: The Price of Human Life

They undoubtedly do cost lives but:

1) You're looking at net lives, and there's no particular reason to think we're net negative yet. Let's imagine a brief lockdown to avoid overwhelming the emergency rooms with people needing ventilators is very net positive. And let's imagine crippling the economy by fully locking down everything until a vaccine passes clinical trials in 18 months is very net negative. Even if you accept these as true, we might have weeks to go until the crossover point arrives...or we might have already passed it.

2) Which brings us to the next point - even if we're already in net negative territory, deaths from Covid-19 are (hopefully) front loaded; they're happening now. Deaths three years from now because the long term economic growth rate is 0.2% lower than it otherwise would have been are still in the future. I linked to some studies suggesting the GFC cost a fair chunk of lives in the end, but you wouldn't have been able to detect any of that the week after Lehman failed; the fallout had yet to land.

And finally:

3) Coming back to the point in the linked article, there's more to life than strict maximising quality-adjusted life years. There's a lot of ways you could, in principle, save lives via a stroke of a pen. Boxing, white water rafting, surfing, diving, and mountain climbing are all shockingly dangerous sports. We could ban them! It'd straight up save lives. Should we? I, for one, would strongly argue no. But that cuts both ways. Even if we had inarguably correct data showing continuing the lockdowns was starting to cost lives, that's the starting point for the debate, not the conclusion. We don't (and shouldn't) just do the things that would save the most lives.

We are in better position then before tho. We have cheaper tests now and we can manufacture them more quickly. The way people get infected is also clearer now and we can have partial limitations on economy more effectively. Pretty soon, we can be in position to test, say, 50% of workers in factory every week and having asymptotic sick at home. People got used to wearing masks in public indoor spaces and to sanitizing their hands upon entering stores.

Overall, we are in much better position to make selective limitations, opening and closing depending on what numbers are. Countries that locked down soon are opening now with small numbers of infections - they are able to do tracing and test all contacts of any new infection.

We are getting better at controlling the pandemic.

Yes, people are really underestimating the effects of the virus that aren't fatal. While I know nobody that's died from it I know several who've been off sick for weeks.

It would. The fact that a science-based public health response to a public health crisis is causing extreme economic hardship for so many people right now indicates that our economic system is broken.

The science behind reducing transmission of the virus is sound. What's going to get people killed in the near term is twofold: people undermining or protesting the quarantine orders; and people who need to go to work in order to support their families and not get evicted, who end up contracting the virus and either dying or spreading it to others. The former is either due to some kind of fucked up value system that interprets a temporary public health quarantine as some kind of intolerable infringement of rights. The latter is because the American form of capitalism leaves so many people so far behind that they can never get ahead.

Regarding point 3, I think your examples, being individual sports that people choose to participate in, are kind of straw men. For one, relatively few people die doing them. For another, as I mentioned, they're activities that people participate in, knowing that there are some serious risks.

A better example would be "let's end all farm subsidies for sugar and tobacco." You could arguably include corn here, as well. Go a little further, and you can start talking about national sugar and tobacco taxes. All these measures simply increase the price of sugar and tobacco, which has been proven to reduce consumption, and would certainly have the effect of reducing obesity and cancer.

I find it a lot harder to argue against those things than to say we should ban surfing, boxing, or rafting, because a few people get injured or die every year doing them.