Hacker News Reader

If hundreds of billions to address the first nuclear meltdown in world history is unimaginably expensive, what do you call the "conservative" estimate of covid-19's total cost of "$16 Trillion" for the US alone? Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7604733/ And that's assuming its all taken care of by fall of 2021.

View on HN

In terms of cost per citizen that's actually the same order of magnitude as the $700 billion quoted here [1] (if as citizens we count Ukraine and Belarus, which is of course not totally fair).

But yes, Covid is also incredibly expensive, and with a couple of years of hindsight we will no doubt talk about its major political impact just like we are talking about Chernobyl contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union.

1: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/2016/05/24/the-financial-costs-...

There’s a cost to building back better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com