Revised: THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF A COVID-19 LOCKDOWN
Martin Lally has revised his paper on the costs and benefits of a Covid-19 lockdown.
The key numbers are:
- Eradication strategy may have saved 1,000 lives
- The estimated number of QALY (quality adjusted life years) is 2,445
- GDP loss is $87 billion
- GDP loss due to lock downs rather than mitigation is $22b
- GDP loss per QALY is $8.5 million
- Normally a QALY is valued at $45,000
- The cost of suppression rather than mitigation is 190 times the pre-Covid value for a QALY
This is why we need a Royal Commission into our Covid-19 response. We need the best experts to evaluate if our response was the best one available, so next time we are acting on a better information base.