I’ve had the great privilege of working these past couple of days, actual working, producing something of value (hopefully) for clients deemed ‘essential’. The experience has been cathartic, if a little eerie, just lil’ ‘ol me in an otherwise empty building.
It didn’t take long after arriving home to begin feeling the irritation that plagued me in the first twelve days of house-arrest, just one look at the news sources enough to bury my bliss in shades of indignation.
Beggaring belief, the performing clowns who ‘predicted’, ‘estimated’, ‘warned’ of up to 80,000 deaths from Kung-Flu here in God’s Own Country are at it again with ‘new modelling’ pretending the lockdown has ‘saved’ many lives, and is working, when all it really shows is that their previous work was contemptible junk, which, incidentally, was not enough to stop them shopping it to ignorant press, ever-ready to sensationalise such rubbish.
Nevertheless, thinking, like everyone else, of the lockdown and relative merits vis-a-vis cost to the community, it’s worth examining the numbers: not the numbers as blurted by attention-whores, but the numbers circulated within the Health Ministry.
The first important number is the cross-infection or reproduction rate of the disease. Based on previous similar examples the ministry estimated, in a preliminary report, a rate (R) of 1.2-1.8 whereas in crowded Wuhan, or on the equally crowded Diamond Princess, the rate had been circa 2.5. Despite the dissimilarities with New Zealand conditions the ministry adopted the 2.5 figure as plausible. That’s fair enough I suppose; be cautious.
On March 23rd the ministry published “Potential Health Impacts from the COVID-19 Pandemic for New Zealand if Eradication Fails“. Let’s look at those:
What we see under the ‘plausible’ rate, R=2.5, is up to 12,700 corona-deaths over the course of the disease track, or perhaps a high of 2,500, or as few as 7, under the more optimistic (realistic?) R=1.5 scenarios. That’s still too high for some people, especially if you happen to be among the Unfortunate Seven.
But weigh these things, we must. The lockdown will cost about $20B according to many estimates; that’s $1,574,803 per avoidable death under R=2.5, or $7,936,507 per avoidable death under R=1.5’s worst-case scenario. Under R=1.5’s best-case scenario it is going to cost us $2,857,142,857 for each and every one of the 7 unfortunate, and avoidable, deaths.
Again: if you happen to be among the potential mortalities, a cost of between $1,574,803 and $2,857,142,857 to keep you above ground is money well spent, but, as a country, will we look back and say it was wisely spent?
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