“Since the coronavirus first slammed the brakes on the U.S. economy in March, policymakers have tried to weigh the cost of keeping people safe against the potentially disastrous consequences of putting millions out of work in a country with a meager social safety net” CBS News reports.
“A group of economists has compared these scenarios in a working paper issued earlier this month and come down squarely on the side of the shutdown: Closing down the economy saved between 900,000 and 2.7 million U.S. lives, they conclude.”
“The authors — economists Olga Yakusheva of the University of Michigan, Eline van den Broek-Altenburg and Adam Atherly of the University of Vermont, and Gayle Brekke of the University of Kansas — don’t try to put a dollar amount on the value of a human life. Instead, they compare the number of deaths avoided through extreme lockdown measures with the number of deaths that might be expected from the long-term effects of the economic shutdown.”