Jules72 3% of gdp Hannu…. Well worth it in Hugo’s beady eyes 🤦♂️
That 3% of GDP is $16bn.
You’re also overlooking the significant costs of lockdown on things such as mental health and children’s education.
Even in purely immediate economic terms, about 8,000 people died of covid in Sweden in 2020, of which almost half were nursing home residents. Remember that the average age of death from covid is 82.4. Meanwhile, average life expectancy in Sweden is 82.96.
Even if Sweden having a more strict lockdown (temporarily) saved the lives somehow of half of all those 8,000 who died, which is a pretty generous estimate, that’s $4,000,000 per person saved.
In the UK, NICE’s “quality-adjusted life year” (QALY) calculation means that the NHS will only consider it justified to pay a max of about £30,000 on medical treatment per “quality-adjusted life year” saved.
Again, even being perhaps a tad generous and assuming 1 QALY saved per each of the 4,000 maybe saved covid deaths, that would put the GDP figure at around 100x what would normally be considered as a reasonable cost of medical treatment.
I remember I did a similar calculation about a year ago on here for the UK for the sum which lockdowns had been estimated to have cost the UK economy, relative to the number of covid deaths, and I recall that the cost had also been ridiculously excessive in that instance as well.
