Comment by parksy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parksy | Hacker News Reader

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If the two metrics used are loss of life vs cost of pandemic, the cost of a life needs to be included in the final score I think.

In Australia, it appears some early models predicted between 50k to 150k lives lost assuming no response. A statistical life is valued at over $4m, meaning a cost of $200bn to $600bn. Also, with 60% of the population infected, that would mean over 12 million people infected - we still don't have a good idea what the long-term issues will be - but one study in Australia found ~5% of people experiencing "long covid" symptoms, which would mean at least 600,000 people with long-term complications - which in our hypothetical Harkonnen society we'd likely just shove them into a hole somewhere and forget about them, otherwise we'd have to deal with their social welfare (yuck!) and strain on the health system.

No doubt the cost, responses, short and long term impacts, etc, will be something economists and sociologists will debate for decades to come.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/thousands-of-predict...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Australia

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-24/long-covid-nsw-resear...

Edit: On thinking about it, I think the value of life is based on insurance / compensation purposes, perhaps the value of a life in terms of total GDP contribution would be different? Anyway, a subject more for the actuaries and economists I think. Interesting to consider nonetheless, which I think may be the overall point of this game.

>In Australia, it appears some early models predicted between 50k to 150k lives lost assuming no response. A statistical life is valued at over $4m, meaning a cost of $200bn to $600bn.

That is the value of an "average" life. But the average age of death from covid is over 75, so the actual economic cost would be much less (which is accounted for when using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year, the standard way of measuring these things).

There's a write up here[0] that in part attempts to compare QALY's lost to strong lockdown vs light lockdown. References this game in fact.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

> This paper finds that the average COVID victim might have lived another 8 QALYs (quality-adjusted life years - a measure of years of life saved, in which years when you are very sick and can’t do anything count as less than a full year) if they hadn’t gotten COVID.

I take issue with this.

The average age in the UK of death was 83 I think, compared to an average life expectancy of 82. Most had more than one comorbidity. Do we really expected these people to live until 90?

In addition to this a lot of the early deaths were in care homes were the residents aren't expected to live 8 years (less than 3 years from a very quick search). That would mean that non care home residents would need to average an ever higher amount of life for that to be true.

Sorry, that seems kind of ridiculous.

The life expectancy of people that die at 82 doesn't count against them like that. Glancing at a UK life table, life expectancy at age 83 is 7 years for men and 8 years for women.

Throw in the youngers and it is clear enough the math should work out fine.

An average includes "youngers".

The expected life expectancy you give isn't for people with an average of two comorbidities.

In our thought experiment, the younger people all have more years of life expectancy than the older people.

I was thinking that the average age of death would have that effect but I wasn't sure what it was called, so I appreciate the pointer to QALYs. Your point is well taken that the total economic cost can't be based on an 'average' life given the typical demographics impacted by the pandemic.

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