PineappleQueen19
VIP Member
This from The Times today is interesting on the longer term economic impact of lockdown
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What cost the lockdown? They helped economies in 1918, study suggests
Seattle could see the pandemic coming as, to the east, town after town fell. When Spanish flu at last hit the Pacific coast the city was ready. Theatres, saloons, churches and schools were shuttered for five months.
In Saint Paul, Minnesota, the response was different. Worried, perhaps, about the economic effects, the town dithered and reopened after a month. Years later, as Seattle boomed, its economy was still suffering.
Economists believe that the 1918 flu pandemic could offer us a parable. For those countries weighing up the economic cost of intervention versus the lives saved, it is part of growing evidence that suggests the two are not mutually exclusive.
The study, by researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared the severity of measures taken a century ago by 43 cities and the subsequent recovery. Their analysis of employment, manufacturing and bank losses implied that the economic costs alone of stopping a pandemic might be less then those of not stopping it.
Although the work has a caveat that Spanish flu had a higher death toll than coronavirus, and killed more people of working age, it is just one of a number of similar analyses being brought out to help governments.
Economists at Chicago University have used standard measures of the monetary value of a life to conclude that, assuming models of the pandemic were correct, the cost in US deaths of not stopping it would be equivalent to $8 trillion, or $60,000 per household.
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What cost the lockdown? They helped economies in 1918, study suggests
Seattle could see the pandemic coming as, to the east, town after town fell. When Spanish flu at last hit the Pacific coast the city was ready. Theatres, saloons, churches and schools were shuttered for five months.
In Saint Paul, Minnesota, the response was different. Worried, perhaps, about the economic effects, the town dithered and reopened after a month. Years later, as Seattle boomed, its economy was still suffering.
Economists believe that the 1918 flu pandemic could offer us a parable. For those countries weighing up the economic cost of intervention versus the lives saved, it is part of growing evidence that suggests the two are not mutually exclusive.
The study, by researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared the severity of measures taken a century ago by 43 cities and the subsequent recovery. Their analysis of employment, manufacturing and bank losses implied that the economic costs alone of stopping a pandemic might be less then those of not stopping it.
Although the work has a caveat that Spanish flu had a higher death toll than coronavirus, and killed more people of working age, it is just one of a number of similar analyses being brought out to help governments.
Economists at Chicago University have used standard measures of the monetary value of a life to conclude that, assuming models of the pandemic were correct, the cost in US deaths of not stopping it would be equivalent to $8 trillion, or $60,000 per household.