I'm hungry, let's eat grandma. Commas save lives.
The above is an example that shows how commas save lives. It's every
writer's favorite joke. But in this time of difficulty, there is another thing
that saves grandma's life. And we will look at it here, but first I would
like to share some statistics with you.
I used to live in Arkansas, in fact I lived there for twelve years. I made
lots of good friends there and still communicate with them via email, and
in the case of two, by snail mail. Internet access is still spotty in some
areas. As I am a true news junky, I still subscribe to the Arkansas State
Journal, all be it by computer these days. The Journal is the main paper
in Arkansas, and it comes out of the capitol, Little Rock.
There was an interesting article on the front page, Monday March 30th.
It gave the breakdown of Covid-19 cases in the state. I was amazed, the
figures show the opposite of what the experts were saying about the
pandemic. The figures from Arkansas were:
* Total number of cases - 473
* Total of cases of those under 18 - 17
* Total of cases of those 19-64 - 307
* Total of cases of 65+ - 149
People over the age of 65 accounted for only 3% of the cases of Covid-19.
There were no figures on the death rate, I'm sure that might tell a
different story.
In the middle of March, President Trump gave an interview to Fox News
where he said he would like to have the United States open for business
by Easter, April 12th, less than one month from then. Initially, Trump
got this idea from watching Fox News. When Larry Kudlow was being
interviewed he said , "We can't let the cure be worse than the problem."
And Tucker Carlson chimed in saying, "...we can't let the epidemiologists
run the country".
That morning Trump tweeted, WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE
THAN THE PROBLEM. And there are several truths to those statements:
no one knows how far-reaching the economic melt-down will be compared
to say, the flu; those affected are the elderly; and the economic costs of
social distancing may be too great, even in the short run. That may not be
entirely wrong, economic cost must be balanced against saving lives. How
many lives saved are worth the trillions of dollars of lost production, lost
jobs and human suffering brought on by social distancing? Or dare I ask,
how much is a human life worth?
That depends on who you ask, if you would say life was immeasurable,
you would know instinctively that was wrong, neither your life or anyone
else's. There are trade-offs that we deal with on a daily basis; car accidents
claim 39,000 lives a year and main hundreds more. Want to give up your
car? No, I didn't think so.
We know we cannot save everyone from dying of the coronavirus, but we
are trying to prevent a catastrophic loss of life. Social distancing is the
cure, and the cure is costly, but it appears to be working. Last month the
rate of increase of infection from Covid-19 was near 30% of new cases
per day, with social distancing it is down to 10% per day. That is
38,000 lives saved in Italy alone.
The world is facing a sever recession, if not a depression due to the economic
shut down across the globe. An economic collapse will surely cost lives,
though in different ways, But not halting the pandemic would also lead to
loss of production output. What is the trade-off?
There are actually people, a subset of economics, that assess these matters
of trade-offs, as ghoulish as this seems. We make trade-offs everyday, we
balance the cost verses the benefit. When we purchase insurance, we are
saying that what we are insuring is worth the price of the policy. If the cost
of insurance is x dollars, and the cost of our car is y dollars, then the value
of our car is x/y.
Decisions like these and other comparatives are consistent across a wide
range of things. So let us make the comparison of resuming production
verses shutting production down. First we must assign life a value, in
this case it is "value of statistical life". This is an economic value used
to quantify the benefit of avoiding fatality. The value includes such things
as: quality, expected lifetime remaining, and earning potential. The United
States Government assigned the "value of life" in 2018 at $10 million.
Using our equation, suppose the economic shut-down due to social distancing
reduces the death toll from the projected 2.2 million persons to a worse-case
scenario of only 120,000. That is a savings of $2-trillion, or close to the
$2.5-trillion GDP in 2019. I think grandma can breathe easy now, we have
her back.
I'm just sayin'.
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