Lockdowns' High Costs and Murky Benefits

Reason ^ | October 23, 2021 | Jacob Sullum

[karpov]

"We're not going to put a dollar figure on human life," Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who was then New York's governor, declared four days after he imposed a statewide COVID-19 lockdown last year. The goal, he explained, was to "save lives, period, whatever it costs."

Ryan Bourne's Economics in One Virus offers a much-needed rejoinder to that morally obtuse position. Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, highlights considerations that politicians like Cuomo too often ignored as they decided how to deal with a public health crisis more serious than any the country had faced since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Eschewing unwarranted confidence, Bourne takes no firm position on the cost-effectiveness of mass business closures or stay-at-home orders. But he does insist, pace Cuomo, that cost-effectiveness matters, and he deftly shows how economic reasoning illuminates such issues.

If legislators were determined to "save lives, period, whatever it costs," they would set the speed limit at 5 miles per hour, or perhaps ban automobiles altogether, which would prevent nearly 40,000 traffic-related deaths every year. Those policies seem reasonable only if you ignore the countervailing costs. In public policy, economist Thomas Sowell famously observed, there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.

"Logically," Bourne writes, "there must be some negative consequences of government lockdowns, and some point at which they might become self-defeating." To figure out when that might be, policy makers needed to estimate the public health payoff from lockdowns and compare it to the harm they caused.

Contrary to Cuomo's framing of the issue, this is not a matter of weighing "the economic cost" of maintaining lockdowns against "the human cost" of lifting them, as if those categories were mutually exclusive.

[Grampa Dave]

Lockdowns, mandated vaccinations and the love of Fauci, are the greatest peacetime policy failures in modern history!!

Cui bono?

Fauci: It’s Time To Give Up Your Individual Right of Making Your Own Decisions:

https://rumble.com/vnemxt-fauci-its-time-to-give-up-your-individual-right-of-making-your-own-decision.html?mref=ah9c7&mrefc=49

Cui bono?

[lightman]

Recently an otherwise very liberal retired Lutheran pastor posted the following in response to the question of what does it mean, specifically, to "take COVID seriously"

"Encouraging and following prevention mandates, such as masks, the necessary shutdowns, etc.
Getting vaccinated.
Getting the booster.
Urging others to get vaccinated.
Taking the extra precautions, like avoiding big crowds, washing hands, checking temperature.
Knowing when you might have been exposed.
Not trash-talking the precautions and those who urge them. Is that so hard? "

I think we found the outer limit of liberalism's ballyhooed "big tent".

[Trillian]