Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
I'm chuffed to be able to expose some of the specious arguments of someone who's obviously a formidable intellect.
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. You framed the line of inquiry - number of lives saved through mitigation versus cost of mitigation - I'm just plugging some best estimates into that. If you think that there's something specious about that approach, let's deal with that now before I waste any more time looking into it.
Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
No: There is no automatic correspondence between the costs of the 'lockdown' and other restrictions imposed on the one hand and the lives saved on the other.
That's not what I proposed. You suggested that a range of non-financial factors - things like the curtailment of liberties, the mental health implications of the 'lock downs' and other government actions - should be costed. I pointed out that that is difficult. What's the objective dollar cost of, or a reasonable surrogate cost for, the 'curtailment of liberties'? If it can't be costed the alternative is to see if it can be reflected in the other factor we're looking at, the denominator - deaths (negative lives saved). Is there an estimate of the number of deaths that arose from the 'curtailment of liberties'?
Getting back to the question asked, what I proposed was that if you could cost those factors for the mitigation scenario we're living in, might the cost be somewhat similar to the costing of the range of non-financial factors associated with some 40,000-odd excess deaths. Just to be clear, do you think that there would be mental health implications associated with some 40,000-odd excess deaths?
Flipping the question around now into the 'currency' of deaths, might the number of deaths that have arisen due to the curtailment of liberties, the mental health implications of the 'lock downs' and other government actions be roughly equivalent to the number that might have arisen due to having to deal with some 40,000-odd excess deaths? Any thoughts on what the numbers might be for each scenario?