People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
(If I may summarize what you've said) Saying that a large number of coincident deaths causes a collective grief that wouldn't have happened otherwise is rather subjective. I have felt nothing of the sort. I don't think it's enough of a concern to justify such an overreach of government power.
Quantifying the value of life as a number is icky but necessary if you're making decisions of this scale.
You can do it - although you can't calculate happiness completely, you can make models and reason about it in a mathematical/economic way. How much you believe the theory maps onto the real world is a valid criticism, however there are entire sections of the social sciences that attempt to do this to help inform policy and decisions (see: Happiness Economics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics).
In fact, the concept of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a very common healthcare economics concept which is used in the UK (NICE) to decide how to allocate drug funding and direct policy.
1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death.
> People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns.
These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing?
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
And on the side of not having lockdowns you'll find things that are much worse than some assumed percentage loss of happiness: people dying in total isolation despite not being sick, people dying of medical care that was withheld because they were too afraid to go to the hospital, a generation whose growth was stunted by lack of education and simple lack of human contact (according to one study, babies during the pandemic had a 22% lower IQ than babies from other years [1]), etc. We have done incredible damage to ourselves.
At the beginning of the pandemic this was justified, since we didn't know if this was going to be a mild case of the sniffles or some kind of air-transmissible ebola. Once we knew it was much closer to the first than to the second, however, we should have adjusted our policies, and we never did. I'm terrified that in the coming months we might see a return to lockdowns, as cases will inevitably rise again, and our politicians know only one answer.
I know an elderly couple that literally hasn't left their house, nor received any visitors other than for things like grocery deliveries, since the beginning of the pandemic. Considering how terrified they now are of the outside world, they will live out their lives in a self-chosen prison cell. They are both fully vaccinated (doctor came to their house for it), but refuse to step outside. Is that life?
As another poster here put it so eloquently: life shouldn't be treated as nothing other than a transmission vector for the virus.
How would you feel about a government policy where people are killed two years before their estimated 'normal' date of death, in order to spare society the massive medical cost of the last few years of living? Evil, right?
How do you feel about a policy where those two years are also taken by the government, but in the middle of your life? Sure, we weren't actually killed; we were allowed to keep producing. The only thing that was taken from us were all the things that made life worth living...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...
I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.
Consider the following questions:
* Would you accept 70 million people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?
* Would you accept 500 people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?
* Would you accept 5,000 people staying inside for a year to extend 10 peoples life by 10 years?
* Would you stay inside for an hour to save another persons life by a year?
* Would you stay inside for a year to save another person life by 1 year?
These are the real questions that we have to answer, and they will absolutely (and unfortunately) need people to face into the question of the value of life.
My personal answer to these questions is (in sequence) No, No, No, Yes, No. A reasonable person could answer completely different - there is no absolute right answer in any of these!
We can pretend that the answer to these questions is impossible - but these are the real decisions that policy makers need to make. How much is someone's freedom worth compared to the life of a stranger?
If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!”
It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.
I didn't assign zero value - I assigned it as 90% value compared to a year with no restrictions.
It's nice you used the time to improve your relationship with your wife, but I'm single and wasn't able to see my friends or family for 6 months. I like that you managed to make the most of it - but my life was put on hold.
> The idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching Netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids.
This post assumes that me being inside for a year stops someone else being suffocated - but actually it's probably more like 100-500 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated (although they will still die of another cause instead, on average a few years later but sometimes many years later). Besides, it's the idea that my freedom (and that of hundreds of others per life saved) should be traded for someone else's health is my issue. Selfish? Sure, but we all are. Everyone on this forum could donate all their earnings this year to save tens of strangers lives in less developed countries but very few do in reality.
> Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic?
See the trolley dilemma - this is a different ethical decision (based on positive action, i.e. doing vs allowing harm).
People in their 30s and 40s are dying and losing decades of life. Kids Even. Slowing down the spread and then vaccination has saved so many millions from rolling that die.
For myself and my wife for example my wife would virtually certainly be dead if she had contracted it and I wouldn't have great odds either. My lungs don't work that well now without benefit of covid
Then there is the damage done by the disease how do you properly value ravaged lungs and damaged bodies that decrease quality of life for the remainder of a life and end it prematurely? Better than half of asymptomatic survivors have lung damage even!
Then every case as a trillion chances at a better covid. How do you value THAT in your equation? Do you try to assign probability to various future death rates and multiply by probability of being realized?
> but actually it's probably more like 100 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated.
Plus 12 from being hospitalized and having substantial damage done to their bodies that decreases their lifespan by 5 years. Plus 20 more who didn't feel serious symptoms but still sustained substantial lung or cardiovascular damage and lost a year.
Even playing the same game I think you are behind the 8 ball.
We are all selfish. It's true but it's a vice not a justification. We ought to strive for better. The life you save may be your own.
* Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years.
* If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost.
If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct.
If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.