[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster’s submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here. To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here, and to see all documents of that inquiry, see here. I helped write some of this and largely agree. So this is the place you can raise objections and suggest additions.]
Cost-Benefit Analysis Executive Summary.
NOTE: The analysis presented here is based on only a partial accounting of the costs of lockdowns. A comprehensive cost-benefit analysis should factor in many additional costs, as detailed below (see “Other costs not tabulated explicitly here, but that should count in the government’s calculus”).
For all of Australia, the minimum cost of a month’s worth of wholesale lockdown is estimated at 110,495 QALYs. This includes:
83,333 QALYs lost due to reduced wellbeing in the immediate term [2 million QALYs lost per year divided by 12 (to recover QALYs lost per month) divided by 2 (to attribute only half of this reduction to lockdowns per se)]
25,812 QALYs lost due to reductions in economic activity directly attributable to government restrictions
600 QALYs lost due to increased suicides during lockdowns
750 QALYs lost in the form of foregone wages of children suffering disrupted schooling during lockdowns.
For all of Australia, the estimated benefit of locking down “ad infinitum” (not only per month) is 50,000 QALYs.
Hence the minimum cost *per six weeks* of wholesale lockdown is at least three times greater than the benefit in terms of Covid-related welfare that could potentially be saved *in total* by wholesale lockdown. For Victoria alone, simply multiply both costs and benefits by the fraction of the Australian population resident in Victoria.
Costs Continue reading →
I’ve been dipping into Herbert Simon’s autobiography, 
