I fail to see how protecting the public health is "immoral."
I agree that there is a strong ethical dimension to consider.
But even if we set that aside and just do cost-benefit analysis, the numbers favor giving a lot of weight to life. There is a concept called the value of a statistical life. It is derived from analysis of how much people show they are willing to pay to avoid an increased risk of dying. The number is around $10 million per life.
I think a good case can be made that all of the measures taken in mid-March saved around half a million lives. 10 million times half a million is a very big number. $5 trillion.
Against that must be weighed the economic cost. Lost GDP or income is coming in at $500 billion per month.
Both numbers are staggering. We had to make an awful choice in mid-March.
And we continue to face awful choices. Which is why I think it is crazy for us not to be looking for a solution that gets us out of having to make those choices. Make the investment to ramp up testing. It will be the best investment we ever made. If we can test on a massive scale, and also trace and quarantine those who are infected, we can safely re-open the economy.
There is another consideration that I think needs emphasis. We need a strategy that is
robust to various outcomes. Our current approach is not robust. It might work if we are lucky. If the reproductive rate of the virus somehow drops to below 1 in places that are re-opening even while it is above 1. But that will require some luck. Which is the opposite of a robust strategy. A robust strategy gets you through even if things do not go as well as planned. And the ONLY robust strategy out there is one based on massive testing. It works even if things don't go well with respect to finding a vaccine or finding ways to treat COVID-19.
