How much is an elder’s life worth?

By Thomas Lifson, AMERICAN THINKER

I am one of the purportedly most vulnerable among us, elderly and with chronic lung problems, so I appreciate all the sacrifices the rest of society are making to protect my life. But even as an ostensible beneficiary of the lockdown, I worry that these sacrifices are just not worth it. I appreciate the efforts to save my life but would rather my children and grandchildren face a world that is not bankrupt. I think that many of us in the later stages of life worry less about prolonging the lives we have already lived for so many years, and more about the world we are leaving to “our scared honor… and posterity,” as the signers of the Declaration of Independence put it. We have already gone a long way down life’s path, but there are others who have yet to get very far.

In that vein, an elderly reader, seeing my thoughts via email, produced this calculus of the monetary cost of prolonging the lives of the elderly:

I ran a few simple numbers to gauge the cost to the US per life saved by shutting down the economy and it is mind blowing.

The average death rate in the US is about 9 per thousand population and with 330 million people this comes to 2.97 million deaths annually.

The cost for shutting down the economy, as per current instructions, will run at least $5 trillion between the various government stimulus and assistance bills and lost tax revenues by the Federal and State governments.

If we did not order everyone to quarantine in place and let business go on as normally as possible, then we might realize 500 thousand deaths to this virus, a 16% increase over normal. With the current guidelines the death estimate is about 100 thousand, or 3.3% above normal. Then, what we are paying per life saved, is $5trillion/ 400 thousand, or $12,500,000 per life saved.

The majority of people dying are elderly (like me), 79% over age 65 or 92% over age 55. With hindsight it would seem that it would have made more sense to quarantine those over 65 and let the economy continue as close to normal as possible. This would also have let the younger generation build up a herd immunity to the virus.

Photo credit: Pixabay

April 27, 2020 | 15 Comments »

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15 Comments / 15 Comments

  2. @ Reader:
    Will do. The circumstantial evidence does point to the epidemic being planned and engineered. Also, that a fairly sizable number of businessmen and government bureaucrats from several different countries, most of them not physicians or otherwise involved in medical care, did most of the planning.

  3. @ Shmuel Mohalever:
    Adam, my reply to you went into moderation because it had a link, I assume you didn’t see it because it was already late at night.
    Google “internet archive” (do all the searches without the double quotes).
    Open the website (it has free books).
    Search the website for
    “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development”.
    Choose PDF from the list of file formats on the right of the screen and click on it.
    Download the PDF file when another screen opens.
    It has 4 possible scenarios for the future written in 2010.
    Could it be that one of them was selected by some people as the best one to be implemented in 2020?

  4. WE ARE DOOMED (sarcasm).
    Coronavirus was detected in dirty industrial air which carries it over long distances (the air probably carries all sorts of other germs, I would think, and affects the condition of people’s lungs).
    6 feet of distancing is deemed NOT enough.
    BTW, Trump administration has been dismantling EPA regulations since taking office in preparation for MAGA.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJJvtdGgau0&feature=emb_logo

  6. @ Bear Klein:
    I was surprised by the findings which differed from what I had read. I wonder what the peer review will say about it.

    Regardless, the focus should remain on what are your chances of dying from it rather than if you die how many years of life do you lose. If the chances are very low then how many years you lose are less meaningful.

  7. The BBC history page “On This Day” (Jan.6) describes the appalling flu season of 1999-2000. Hospitals were overwhelmed. A severe shortage of hospital beds and nurses throughout the UK and in 19 U.S. states. A horrendous death toll, especially among the elderly and nursing home residents. Yet no government named it as an “epidemic” let alone a pandemic.

    My mother had Alzheimer’s disease and was living in a nursing home at the time. She did get very ill with a respiratory disease, and nearly died. The nursing home did absolutely nothing for her except place her in complete isolation for weeks. I took her to an infectious disease specialist outside the nursing home over the protests of the nursing home director and the staff doctor. As best I can recollect, he did nothing for her either. NO ONE SAID ANYTHING ABOUT AN EPIDEMIC, LET ALONE A PANDEMIC. I watched the news every day on TV, but there was no reference to it. The only topic of interest was Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment of Clinton.

    Eventually the staff doctor conceded that Mom had pneumonia. Amazingly, she recovered on her own with no help whatsoever from the nursing home staff. I finally succeeded in moving her to a much better nursing home, although the paperwork and bureacracy was incredible. The process took several months. Amazingly, my Mom was a real fighter, and survived another foor years in a better nursing home with a much better staff doctor.

    in 2000, no one did anything about a pandemic or even named it. In 2020, they forced the entire population into isolation and destroyed the world economy. Go figure.

  8. @ Ted Belman:
    The study based on large databases came out to the following conclusion::

    Getting coronavirus ‘will take 13 years off your life’, UK researchers claim

    The researchers are calling for years of life lost to be reported on more to allow the public and policy-makers to “better understand the burden of this disease”

    You believe it is okay to try and minimize the study by quoting views and not studies. That is your right. Anecdotally medical people I am speaking with regularly are saying this a vicious disease killing people including younger people.

  9. @ Bear Klein:

    What we do not know is what will happen to these numbers in the future and whether in a few months time deaths will drop below expected levels.

    If that happened, it would suggest coronavirus has brought forward deaths that you would expect to happen over the course of the next year.

    Is the virus bringing forward deaths by a few months?
    Every year, about 600,000 people in the UK die. And the frail and elderly are most at risk, just as they are if they have coronavirus.

    Nearly 10% of people aged over 80 will die in the next year, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge points out, and the risk of them dying if infected with coronavirus is almost exactly the same.

    That does not mean there will be no extra deaths – but, Sir David says, there will be “a substantial overlap”.

    “Many people who die of Covid [the disease caused by coronavirus] would have died anyway within a short period,” he says.

    Knowing exactly how many is impossible to tell at this stage.

    Prof Neil Ferguson, the lead modeller at Imperial College London, has suggested it could be up to two-thirds.

    But while deaths without the virus would be spread over the course of a year, those with the virus could come more quickly – that, of course, was the logic for the lockdown to stop the health service being overwhelmed.

    Contrast this with

    Covid-19 is taking more than 10 years off of the life of people dying from it a British Study found.

    I just checked twitter and it is full of angry people reacting to the lockdown arguing it isn’t right,

  10. I love the typo: “SCARED honor”.
    Thinking that governments want to save the lives of the elderly is very naive.
    Personally, I feel that they are making the elderly the lower caste of society.
    I don’t feel “saved”. I feel controlled, demeaned, humiliated, and interfered with, and I will never agree to be quarantined solely because of my age and because some bureaucrat wishes me put away for his own corrupt reasons.
    Neither will I accept “mandatory vaccinations”.
    I do think that it is wrong to go into cost/benefit analysis when human life is concerned but the whole debacle is not about saving lives, anyway.

  11. @ Ted Belman:
    Read the article the study says they do not know how much forward it is bringing the deaths. Unlike the study I referenced which used two large databases and accounted for the diseases the people had to come their conclusions.

    You would need to get into the bowel of the study to properly critique it.

    Look I am pointing out an interesting study. Do I know it is correct or not, of course not. I am just trying to learn about this new disease Covid-19. Many people have their minds made up and are taking political like positions in lieu of being open minded and wanting to learn about Covid-19.

  13. @ Ted Belman:
    I want to see a different study. I some anecdotal comments read elsewhere, my response is so. Especially with so many having a point they want to make.

  15. Covid-19 is taking more than 10 years off of the life of people dying from it a British Study found. They adjusted the study for the pee-existing conditions Also they are now finding younger in their 30 -40 year old age who had mild Cov-19 symptoms are getting blood clots and dying of strokes. So we are just learning about this virus and do not yet completely understand it.

    I still like saving lives.

    Getting coronavirus ‘will take 13 years off your life’, UK researchers claim

    The researchers are calling for years of life lost to be reported on more to allow the public and policy-makers to “better understand the burden of this disease”

    https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/getting-coronavirus-will-take-13-21923127