But making everyone poorer through less economic activity also kills people - it's not a straight decision between saving lives or economic activity. People die in both cases.

Exactly correct.

“You can’t put a price on Human life!”

Well, it turns out you can. The NHS uses a “Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY)” as a measure of cost versus benefit for interventions - each extra year of normal quality of life is worth £30,000. The DfT have the same measure, but they value it as £60,000. In this instance they are considering the impact of transport disasters.

I’d question how many QALYs the quarantine has actually saved, versus the immense costs to industry (and therefore tax income, etc). I’m pretty sure I can guess which side of the cost / benefit ratio it comes down on.

It's not just a matter of economic activity, although poverty indeed kills people by itself. Living through an extended period of lockdown with no end in sight takes a serious toll on everyone's physical and mental wellbeing. You can't go anywhere other than the grocery store, you can't see anyone, you can't plan anything, you can't do your job - the list goes on and on. It's probably more or less bearable if you are a clinically reclusive type who doesn't step out of their bedroom even in the best of times - and if you have a firm source of income that's not reliant upon the situation outside, maybe a state pension. But, for most people, any further extension of this torture would hardly be tolerable. And not only because people lose their jobs en masse. Something a lot worse is that people who used to be perfectly healthy and mentally stable some months ago now have a deteriorating health and mental issues which are a lot more likely to kill them or decimate their quality of life than corona.

Interesting perspective when you look at the total death rate per 1000 historically - even with the current level of pandemic deaths we are still only back at the level of what was the 'norm' 15 years ago. I must say that personally I didnt feel that unsafe then, certainly not to the extent oo shutting myself away from society.


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....a7fc08610f.png
hat tip Hector Drummond

I don't find it ugly at all. At some point pragmatism has to win out, and there needs to be a move away from the childish notion that human life is priceless.

A very interesting graph. I wonder what happened around 1980 that started the downward trend?

Something doesn't look right. If the average life expectancy is 80 years, then the average death rate should be around 12. An average rate of 9, would mean a life expectancy of 111...

That can be explained by the fact that the UK population has increased over time. 80 years ago it was <50m; now it’s approaching 70m. There are also demographic variations.

I believe we'll look back and conclude we over-protected those that didn't need protecting and under-protected those that did.

The decline from the early 80s is down to a number of things I think. Firstly heath awareness and diet. Levels of smoking also began to fall dramatically as did the number of men in heavy dirty industries, coal mining, steel works, working with asbestos etc. Health and safety got into full swing, car accidents became much more survivable. Medical advancements came on in leaps and bounds such as cancer detection and treatment. Golden years of heath progress.

The death rate should currently be far lower than normal because we are still effectively doing little elective surgery (a disgrace in itself, but for another thread). We last stopped elective surgery in the UK in the 1970s when consultants went on strike and the death rate plummeted because although operations help more people than they harm, some are harmed.

Then add in the people we didnt screen since March, or who didnt present with initial symptoms od cancer / heart disease / stroke - their mortality will be greater but this will not be seen for some time. Overall excess deaths will continue to accumulate for many years. All we can currently say is that the level of infection and the belated locking down of the elderly currently leads to few daily deaths compared with pre covid, but the infection is still there and a rebound is possible. It could get out of control quickly if we misjudge it.

UK is very different from Oz SOPS as well you know. It's a geographic crossroads with a population of 65,000,000 in a landmass the size of Victoria! To quarantine the UK would be totally pointless as once the virus is in it just spreads like mad (current estimates are that over a sixth of the UK population have actually had the virus now; showing how low the actual mortality is). Australia is of course at the bottom of the world and except for NZ would be a Cul-de-Sac, and with a far less dense population control is a different exercise. As for Comrade Dan's efforts to eradicate rather than contain? Kind of missing the point isn't he? There's a good chance that we'll have to learn to live with this virus; I do feel that Oz and NZ are going to be somewhat left behind!

Oh, yes. Probably offloading corona patients into care homes "to save hospital capacity" wasn't the best idea. But, as hard to justify as it is, insufficient protection of care facilities accounted for a huge fraction of the deaths in many countries, including but not limited to Sweden, Italy and Spain. On the contrary, in Eastern Europe there were far less deaths because very few of the seniors there live in care homes and can therefore self-isolate more efficiently in their private accommodation.