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How deadly is #COVID19?
It varies a lot by age, which confuses us.
In fact, the mortality risk from covid-19 is almost exactly the same as 1 year worth of "normal" background risk. You just get an extra year of risk compressed into a few weeks.
It varies a lot by age, which confuses us.
In fact, the mortality risk from covid-19 is almost exactly the same as 1 year worth of "normal" background risk. You just get an extra year of risk compressed into a few weeks.
But young people don't have very much risk per year. So deleting a teen, 20, 30, 40 or 50 year-old's year via lockdowns is 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵. https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196
Year-long Lockdowns only start to become worth it on a per-person basis if:
(years of life remaining)×(risk of dying of #COVID19) > (years of lockdown)×(quality of life decrease from lockdown)
(years of life remaining)×(risk of dying of #COVID19) > (years of lockdown)×(quality of life decrease from lockdown)
Since it's hard to nail down a precise value for the quality of life decrease, let's assume that that's somewhere between -5% and -50%.
What does the tradeoff look like by age group for a 1.5 year long lockdown?
I made a spreadsheet:
What does the tradeoff look like by age group for a 1.5 year long lockdown?
I made a spreadsheet:
It turns out that even a 10% quality loss for 1.5 years leads to a net reduction in QALYs, and that's without weighting older people's life-years as less valuable, i.e. we are assuming that a year in a nursing home = a year in your 20s.
And it's still not worth it.
And it's still not worth it.
Contrast that to a 3 month lockdown, which is worth it even if we heavily discount the lives of people over 55 (i.e. 75 y/o lives are valued at just 30% of under-55s) and consider lockdown a 25% loss of life quality:
This is the model as a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wBcHkt9i_4hGSXRrqurr82j-R_X03nyr_Eds6YLjkzc/
(make a copy of the spreadsheet to edit it)
