Originally Posted by
homonculus
A year ago if people had suggested taking affirmative action to kill 500,000 British citizens, they would have been sent to the funny farm.
I agree, it sounds crazy to me, even today. I've seen a previous comment comparing the COVID-19 response to how aviation safety is achieved, so I will make some comparisons between COVID 19 and MCAS on the 737 MAX. Yes, really
Before being grounded the 737 MAX had a fatality rate of 0.0004% per flight (2 crashes in 500,000 flights). Credible estimations for the COVID-19 IFR are somewhere between 0.5% and 1.0%. So being infected by COVID-19 could be least 1000 times more dangerous than flying on the MAX one time. And also harder to avoid.
With the estimated 500,000 COVID-19 deaths in UK, if the entire population gets infected, you would need to crash more than 2,500 737 MAXes full of people into the ground, just in the UK, to achieve a similar result. Only 387 MAXes have been delivered so far, so that wouldn't even work. Officially there are 21,678 COVID-19 deaths so far in the UK. That's equivalent to around 120 crashes of the 737 MAX so far. Just in the UK. Worldwide there are currently 217,571 COVID-19 deaths reported. That's equivalent to around 1,200 737 MAX crashes.
Assuming a 0.75% COVID-19 IFR, and the entire world population infected, you are looking at around 58 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide. That's equivalent to about 320,000 737 MAX crashes. Yes, most of the "PAX" affected by COVID-19 will be old people. But it still sounds unacceptable to me, so "grounding" parts of the world economy to try preventing that makes sense in my opinion.
Looking at it in another way, the world gross product is only around 800 times higher that the yearly revenue of Boeing at its peak. And the MAX was grounded after just two crashes. We are at 1,200 COVID-19 equivalent "crashes" right now, so we are somewhere between the two MAX crashes in an equivalent timeline, except many parts of the world economy that were causing the risk have been grounded already, so we did better than the FAA did with the MAX to manage the risk. But some people are proposing to lift the COVID-19 "grounding", without eliminating most of the risk first. That sounds unwise to me.