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Moral COVID-19 Economy Health Chris Stoate
We are watching world leaders, including our own, choose between optimum containment of the coronavirus and salvaging what economic activity is possible. A choice between lives and livelihoods.
In the UK, the Imperial College study that woke many up to the risks of this pandemic estimated that if life were to continue as normal, 500,000 people would die there. With the measures being taken, Neil Ferguson, one of the study’s authors, now thinks that could, ideally, be limited to 20,000, about half of whom would likely have died anyway in the same calendar year.
We will never know if the first estimate was right, and it will take time before we can validate the new estimate, but if both were true, that would mean 490,000 lives were saved in the UK alone by social distancing and the pausing of significant parts of the economy.
Not much moral ambiguity there.
But some estimates of the current pausing of commercial activity, if continued for the three months more many scientists believe is advisable, suggest dire consequences for the economy long term. It could, some say, take decades to recover from this, with the economy falling back 20% or more at first. What are the consequences in deaths from unemployment and bankruptcies leading to suicide, mental health issues, alcoholism and substance abuse, marital breakdown, child abuse and conjugal violence, or more directly, from increased crime?
Even if we can make up for lost incomes with government programs, what of the loss of purpose, the sense of dependence that attends unemployment or business failure on a large scale? Couple that with the risk scientists have also flagged that this virus could come back strongly into a population that, protected from it, has developed little immunity, and the right path is difficult to discern.
Until a safe vaccine, an effective cure, or both, are widely available, our decision makers are faced with very difficult choices. They have to try to make sure that as many as people as possible are saved from the virus by flattening the contagion curve so that everyone who needs it gets access to treatment, and they have to do it in a way that doesn’t damage the economy any more than absolutely necessary in the long term: the health of the economy is a public health issue too.
These choices are made even more challenging as they are based on models which are evolving quickly from data sets derived from different countries taking different measures and with different cultural contexts: Italy has extended multi-generational families living together and is on lockdown; Sweden still has its schools and restaurants open but has age segregated living.
Milton Friedman once said that making economic policy is like driving a car (the economy) with no way to see where you are going except for a small space in the rear window. You then have and an accelerator, brake and steering wheel (policy tools) which, when used, take effect to varying degrees at unpredictable times. That seems to me to be a pretty good analogy for policy making in the time of the coronavirus. In Canada, up to now, our politicians have taken the lead of public health professionals and rightly focused on trying to keep the contagion down to a level we hope the hospitals and doctors and nurses can handle. At some point, they will have to face that there is a trade-off to be made between lives and livelihoods, and weigh risks to economic devastation against risks of a greater spread of the virus.
Leaders will have to face that there is a trade-off to be made between lives and livelihoods.
That will be a judgement call, to some degree a moral decision, and will be the point when political leaders, instead of taking a back seat to scientists, will have to weigh all of the factors to make decisions that are in the best interests of the country as a whole. Flawed human beings as they are, they will no doubt be doing their best to strike the right balance. The rest of us need to be understanding of the position they are in, and perhaps a little grateful we are not the ones making the decisions.
Read more articles by Chris Stoate on OakvilleNews.Org. You can follow Chris Stoate on Twitter @ChrisStoate.
