This week we were struck by a real mask off moment (in more ways than one) from Nick Cater in The Australian. Comparing the plight of locked-down Victoria with that of loosely-regulated Arizona, he concluded:
Arizona is paying its own price. Its COVID death toll on Saturday was 4688. Victoria, with a similar-sized population, has registered fewer than 400 deaths. Some, however, may view the loss of life in Arizona as an acceptable price for the maintenance of freedom.
Arguing for an approach that would result in a 10-fold increase in deaths requires some awkward contortions, and, in some cases, it has.
So credit to Cater, and the following, who have been admirably direct in their equation of living breathing people with numbers.
Adam Creighton
Creighton, the Oz’s economics editor, established himself as king of this genre of take with the following effort in April:
However many lives the more onerous restrictions have saved, the cost is looking enormous and far more than we typically spend to save lives. If we’d followed the Swedish trajectory we might, crudely, have an extra 4500 fatalities by now (our population is 2½ times the size).
For the federal government alone, that works out at $48 million per life saved, given the $214 billion in budgeted federal assistance. That’s more than 10 times the conventional estimate for the statistical value of a human life…
Andrew Bolt
When not expressing terror at government overreach, Bolt was shrugging at the prospect (soon to be a reality) of a few extra families needlessly losing their grandparents;
Note: 40% of aged care home residents die within nine months. The average stay is just under three years.
So Victoria’s bans are doing huge damage to — essentially — save aged care residents from dying a few months earlier.
Gigi Foster
The ABC is still searching through its archives for an issue it won’t present both sides of. So back in July Q&A host Hamish Macdonald might have been the only who was shocked, just shocked, when economist Gigi Foster advocated for Australia to follow the example set by Sweden, using the following stats:
If you look at what’s happening to those death counts around the world, in every country that has had a proper first wave, [they are] somewhere between 0.5% and 0.1%t of the population.
That translates in Australia to about 12,000 to 25,000 deaths for people who are predominantly elderly or immunocompromised. But it’s a body count.
Indeed. It was somewhat less shocking to those of us who recalled her previous appearance on Q&A three entire months earlier.
John Kehoe
In the midst of this, we have to give credit to The Australian Financial Review’s John Kehoe, who was very happy to humanise the potential victims of the virus. Like, really, intimately humanise the potential victims. Under the headline, “Lives matter but at what cost?”, he offers up his strikingly not-that-old dad for the economy:
My father is 68 and insists he’s had a good run. With the swimming pool and tennis club in his Victorian town now closed, his daily pursuits are off limits. His physical fitness and mental well-being are suffering.
Some seniors like him would not put their own life above the livelihoods of their children and grandchildren, if the economic and social costs become too great.
It would be worth applying similar cost-per-life-saved mathematics to the “war against terror”. A moment’s reflection suggests that the more relevant calculation is cost-per-terrified-swinging-voter captured.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t see the point of consulting a neo-liberal economist for ethical or moral advice on anything at all, let alone something that might adversely affects the sacred cow of commerce. Also, hard right commentators pushing the argument that it is “just” old people who will die (or suffer long term health effects) is both wrong and stunningly hypocritical, given their usual “right to life” stance that the right trot out when opposing euthanasia or abortion. Money definitely trumps all when it becomes a choice between your life and their dough.
Society, community and economy are all interwoven in a capatalist democratic society. Even in a communist society the economy is important. Economy is the shoulders that society and community stand on. Without economy it’s a mad max film
Yes, the indifference to the value of human life of people who unreflectingly think that the Utilitarianism of their favourite economic theories can be straightforwardly extrapolated to other ethical questions is puzzling, and sometimes breathtaking. Perhaps economically trained commentators should all be required to undertake a course in ethics. For seniors who are ill, the most chilling of your commentators is Gigi Young, who thinks the value of a human life is proportionate to their QALYs, or quality adjusted expected years of life. The sicker you are, the more easily may your life be discarded, regardless it seems of whether there is an actual shortage of capacity for medical treatment. We all saw what that was like in Italy, when doctors were forced to ration hospital access to those more likely to survive. The same lack of understanding of their position leads these philosophically naive commentators Not to realise that view says it is OK to engage in involuntary euthanasia of the sick whose lives can be saved only at a cost greater than their lives are worth. Meanwhile, NZ has managed to eliminate community transmission and are opening up at a cost not much greater than Sweden experienced at much greater cost to life. Curiously, Sweden’s heath advisor didn’t not seem to think the high death rate in Swedish aged care homes was negligible, because after all, they would be dead in a few months anyway, without it really mattering much that their younger descendants would not be allowed to say goodbye, since their lives were more valuable.
QALYs are exactly what hospital and health managers use to assign resources everyday. It is not a matter of knocking people off, it is a mater of spending limited resources where they do the most good for the majority. Utilitarianism if you will .. I prefer to see it as the reality.
The fact the hundreds who die every years, year in year out, because of age, infirmity and infections of one sort or another, are conveniently hidden in various repositories from the view of everybody, including many relieved relatives, does not mean it does not go on..
Triage is a common practice when medical care has to be assigned to those have a better chance of living than others.
You just don’t hear (or likely really bother to care) about these issues
If the ABC were to treat ‘normal’ death day in day out in the same extraordinary way they do Covid, then all that would appear on our screen all day would be an orgy of old and/or decrepit people dying..
“Sadly another 90 year old on dialysis has died..”
There are 4 things that can not be avoided in life.
Pain, Politicians, Taxes and Death. All else is a positive.
The maudlin suggestion that young people will not be able to say Good Bye to their elderly relatives, safely stored away in God’s Waiting Rooms in Old Peoples’ Resorts would be laudable if it were applied all day and everyday to all people suffering on this planet.
Just to give you a few figures..
The ‘normal flu” outbreak of 2019 was expected to effect about 2 million Australians and kill 4000.. Where plans made to shut everything down then? Would they be made every year? Will that be what we do in future? Destroy our societies and economies because of a really rather trivial virus?
Globally, this virus has killed 0.01% of the world population or 2% of those who die anyway, each day and everyday.
Do we shut down significant parts of the human economy for them?
You say taxes cannot be avoided. Do you have a shred of evidence to support that?
According to Burmese lore, the four things to be avoided at all costs are fire, flood, famine and government.
I like it. The last one is pertinent right now given our state and federal government attack on it’s young and healthy.
I was with you for the first part, but in the last para you compare flu deaths (no special precautions) with COVID ( with lockdown). Without lockdown, it an be assumed many more than 4000 would die of COVID.
I agree – many either don’t know or ignore that doctors make decisions that impact on whether someone gets treatment as they approach death, or do not. In some cases, people simply refuse treatment (my late-Mother was one, in the last couple of days of her life) and doctors will usually abide by the wishes of the person and their family. I knew a doctor who admitted to me that in surgery where a person was beyond hope, surgeons might sometimes choose not to intervene, although the circumstances where that would occur were generally very, very clear cut. BUT, those decisions are made by doctors – people who are trained to save lives, but who often know when all hope is lost – because they are trained to know that. That is very different from economists like Gigi Foster (who I personally found to be repugnant – as much for her rapid-fire high pitched squeal-like delivery as her ideas) purporting to know the value of a life and pontificating as though it is an area where they have “special expertise”, when in fact there might be a “figure”, but it is based on a series of assumptions and those assumptions will be driven by the biases of the economist. The sad reality is that, as we know, economists often disagree and it doesn’t matter what the issue, there can always be found an economist who will come out with a carefully concocted, but often specious and biased, argument in favour of a proposition – however flawed that proposition might be. Some economists, for example, support corporate tax cuts – but their is zero evidence to support their proposition that corporate tax cuts promote economic growth. Milton Friedman (and Hayek and others before him) were convinced of the propositions underlying neo-liberalism – and yet such ideas have repeatedly shown themselves to be grievously flawed – if not utter tosh.
Everyone put a monetary value on life, though they may choose not to acknowledge it. Those who claim they don’t are being disingenuous or dishonest. As is this piece – a typically slanted Crikey story which uses any topic as an excuse to take a swipe at its “enemies” in the “mainstream” media.
I’m a 70 year old who is deeply uncomfortable with the cost of “saving” me. I’m reasonably well-off, have no need of government assistance, and have not taken any. The astonishing cost of recent measures (and this is Gigi Forster’s point) of making me even more “relaxed and comfortable” is disproportionately borne by the young and the most disadvantaged – who in many cases will be paying the debt for the rest of their lives. I have never nor would I have voted for anything that would have made the poor worse off, thwarted the ambitions and damaged the economic prospects of the young. But then I wasn’t given a choice.
Is there a 70 year old alive who has not come to terms with their own mortality? None that I know, and I have talked to others in my age group… Something is going to kill us sometime. No one I know is going to cower in fear behind locked doors trying to prevent it. The lockdowns, closed borders and billions of dollars showered in our direction are not our choice.
I’m 73 and still work, I must be made of different stuff because I exercise each day use my brain and contribute to the economy. I have not yet jumped into the grave clad in beige and commenced to pull the dirt in on myself. Our young always carry the burden for the old as in wartime, we recruit perfectly fit 20yo people and send them of to be killed on our behalf without question, that is a much greater price to pay than an economic one. You need to read up on modern monetary theory where you will find that the money being spent is ALWAYS available to sovereign governments. They can sell bonds to access liquidity for any reason driven only by ideology and it is NOT a debt to be paid off by future generations it will be paid gradually as the economy improves as a result of inflation.
And government debt can ALWAYS be seen as investment.
And my take on this is that the money you speak off can by used to FIX aged care. Then the rest of us can continue to contribute to a functioning society whilst it lasts.
I am 74 BTRI and am in complete agreement with you on this one.
Everyone is using numbers to justify their case. The epidemiologists are using models (numbers converted into graphs) to justify restrictions on human behaviour. There are (theoretical) models of damage to mental health and domestic violence that can be constructed to provide a different perspective on the impact of lockdown restrictions. There is no ‘correct’ discourse of analysis, only the analytical lens through which a person prefers to gaze.
I would like it explained how our small sampling of tests is in any way indicative of how many people have contracted Covid. The deaths are a fixed number, but the number of positive cases are naturally exponentially higher because of our small sample.