I guess if you had everyone rate the relative worth of each year of their lives and the effect of lockdown on that value, the maximizing strategy would be probably be no lockdown.

The thing is though that those later years of people’s life are often worth very much to those around them.

For instance, what about a four year old whose primary caretaker is their grandmother? Four is a precious year with an outsize effect on the trajectory of someone’s life. The calculations are not so simple then.

Imagine sacrificing the fun of our youths in order to prevent them from acquiring and carrying a disease which is currently infecting half a million people per day in the USA and has now killed more than 330,000 people. Long term effects on people who get it but survive are not known... but may include heart/lung damage and, hey, erectile dysfunction.

(New Zealand, you go ahead and enjoy yourselves. Remember to use protection.)

It really looks like you're comparing the lives of human beings to young people having fun. What's the exchange rate?

Should we remove the laws about driving while intoxicated? That's just another form of reckless endangerment that leads to loss of life.

Should we be driving at all? After all, every second spent driving a car is equivalent to you killing someone with a low probability.

> It really looks like you're comparing the lives of human beings to young people having fun. What's the exchange rate?

It's the Quality-Adjusted Life Year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

yikes, that's chilling.

> The method of ranking interventions on grounds of their cost per QALY gained ratio (or ICER) is controversial because it implies a quasi-utilitarian calculus to determine who will or will not receive treatment.

Hardly chilling. Simply pretending tradeoffs don't exist doesn't make them go away.