Epic Incoherence

"Two words: In. Sane."
--Albert Gibson (True Lies)

Trying to wrap my head around the costs of what we're doing. Assume the following rough estimates:

lost production due to lockdown = $2 trillion (10% of $20T annual GDP)
policy interventions (monetary + fiscal) = $5 trillion
acute COVID health care = $0.5 trillion
future social and economic problems from current lockdown = $1 trillion
total = $8.5 trillion

Frankly, I think these estimates are conservative.

The US population is about 330 million. As such, current intervention is costing each citizen almost $26,000--more than $100,000 for a family of four.

Where is that $100K per household going to come from?

On the disease outcome side, currently about 5,100 people have died from nearly 217,000 positive reported COVID-19 cases. About 10% of those positive cases require hospitalization and let's say half of those are critical enough where in-patient care prevents death. That's about 11,000 prevented deaths. Not all of those can be credited to government lockdown policies, however, because interventionary policies are largely aimed at 'flattening the curve'--i.e., to delay (not prevent) the onset of infection in order to keep critical care capacity utilizations below 100%.

Stated differently, a sizeable fraction of critical care COVID-19 patients would have been saved had there been no interventionary lockdown. Let's credit the lockdown with saving half of those patients--5,500 of them. At $8.5 trillion in total, that's a cost of about $1.5 billion per prevented COVID-19 death.

Of course, COVID-19 infections are projected to get much worse from here. If the public health situation escalates 15x worse from here and results in, say, 80,000 prevented COVID-19 deaths, then the cost per prevented death from government intervention would still amount to more than $100 million.

But even if 1,000,000 COVID-19 deaths are ultimately prevented, the cost per prevented death would be $8.5 million each. If 50 million deaths were prevented, the cost would still be $170,000 per saved life.

Even if my cost estimates up top are double what they turn out to be (I think they're actually low), then it is still difficult to get the math to work.

Of course, this analysis fails to balance the cost of deaths that will surely result in the future as a consequence of lockdown policies aimed at reducing deaths in the present. If you care committed to saving lives now from COVID-19, why are you willing to kill people in the future in order to accomplish your goal?

Another question. Why were you not committed to saving lives from seasonal flu by employing similar measures in past years? Even if COVID-19 is more lethal to at-risk demographics, surely people could have been saved by lockdowns in past years? Why is it ok to act now but not then?

For reasoning minds, the incoherence is epic.