As an increasingly vaccinated world emerges from lockdowns, lots of people are talking about whether the fight against the pandemic was too strong or too weak. Some people argue restrictions did not go far enough; others maintain the attempted cures have been worse than the disease.
One reason for these conflicting views is that the answer depends on both facts and values.
Relevant facts include features of the virus like transmission rates and deaths. Government policies were often guided by scientific findings to reduce the spread of the virus and the resulting illnesses and deaths.
Relevant values include health and longevity, but also prosperity, opportunity, equality and freedom. Different people weigh those values differently.
Our research on the study of how fair and reasonable discussion helps citizens reach political decisions suggests there will never be widespread agreement on whether lockdowns, the most controversial coronavirus policy, were worthwhile.
Costs versus benefits
In a perfect world, policymakers’ decisions are based on evidence. But which science and data matter to some people is different from the science and data that matter to others. Should the government prioritize public health at the expense of the economy? Should individuals sacrifice liberty for the social good?
In principle, the U.S. could have devoted all of society’s resources to fighting coronavirus – but doing so would have meant ignoring all other illnesses and the personal priorities that make life worth living, like hugging Grandma on July 4th.
Cost-benefit analyses offer one way to ensure that various trade-offs are explicitly considered rather than left unstated. These analyses rely on well-established methods to estimate how much society is implicitly willing to pay to save one life.
Based on those estimates, the number of deaths prevented by coronavirus mitigation policies could be converted into dollars for the “benefit” side of the ledger. The associated “costs” include direct government expenditures now and into the future, along with lost wages and revenues for individuals and businesses.
With both benefits and costs denominated in dollars, it’s potentially possible to determine a policy’s net social effect: It’s a simple math problem.
Lockdowns are hard to evaluate
But even if we could cleanly compare costs to benefits, it’s impossible to definitively measure the effects of lockdowns. Communities that had longer and more extensive lockdowns were often those likely to be more vulnerable to the spread of disease, or with less access to medical care.
For example, some denser places with more intergenerational households introduced severe lockdowns – but were also more likely to suffer high levels of virus transmission and death. This would artificially make it seem like lockdowns didn’t work, because those places still suffered many deaths – just fewer than they would have without the lockdowns.
The range of costs and benefits
Even if it were possible to isolate the number of deaths prevented through a lockdown, it’s hard to measure other costs and benefits associated with coronavirus policies.
Confining people to their homes may have reduced their odds of spreading the virus. But staying home may have raised other risks, such as domestic abuse, addiction and mental health problems and the harms from delayed treatments for other medical conditions.
Among children, the lack of in-person schooling can hurt learning and raised rates of anxiety, depression and sleep disorders. Other potential costs can be measured only in the future – such as smaller expected earnings among people whose learning was slowed down. James D. Long, University of Washington
MDT/The Conversation
No Comments