This is absolutely true. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP fell $191.2 billion in Q1 2020. Q2 will probably be worse, and estimates of the total cost when it’s all over are $1-2trillion.
For comparison, I did some math around the value on the other side of the scale: the dollar value of lives lost to COVID (see spreadsheet here), and my quick and dirty estimate is that the value of life lost from COVID in the US is at least $8 billion, and may be higher than $20 billion.
My method is very rough, and I can think of a few ways that it can be improved, but here is how I arrived at those numbers:
I found life expectancy data from the Social Security Administration, which shows how many years of life a person of a given age can expect. I couldn’t find national demographics for COVID deaths by age, so I used NY death demographics as a proxy. Since their numbers are in age bands, I averaged the life expectancy for all the ages in a band, and I used the male life expectancy because 1) men die more frequently from COVID, and 2) men don’t live as long. To exclude those who would have died anyway, I used the %, I used the numbers for people who either don’t have a preexisting condition or for whom it is unknown whether or not they have a preexisting condition. That gave me [average years left] * [number dead (60966 on 4/30)] = [total lost years]. I then found estimates for the value of a year of life. There was significant variation, but I did the math for both $50k and $129k: [value of a year of life] * [total lost years] = [dollar cost of loss of life]. The result is $8,517,131,122.25, assuming $50k per life-year, and $21,974,198,295.41 assuming 129k per life-year.
Issues with this approach:
As the wiki page points out, there are better ways to estimate lives in dollars, but I don’t know how to do the estimate using QALYs. On the one hand, my estimate may overestimate the true cost, because it treats life-years for all ages as equal in value, which we can be pretty sure they aren’t.
On the other hand, I exclude the majority of deaths completely, which is definitely wrong, and probably orders of magnitude larger in effect: deaths with preexisting conditions under 65 are about a quarter of all deaths, and most of those will have a non-zero number of years left. I’ve basically treated those people as already dead.
Generalizing from the NY data probably isn’t perfect.
Using only the male data isn’t perfect, and under-counts the cost by 1-5 years per person.
The cost in lost GDP is for Q1, but most deaths tool place in Q2.
The cost in lost GDP includes the cost of both the loss of life and the lockdown-generated economic collapse.
Some additional questions:
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How many lives has lockdown saved? How many lives will it save? This estimates cost of what has happened, not what would have happened. If we think the lockdown has cut deaths in half, it’s a very different outcome from what it would be if we think it was only cut by 5%.
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What percent of the loss of GDP is caused by formal lockdown, as opposed to voluntary social distancing? Sweden, the poster child for a less mandatory approach, still saw a 75% drop in movement. Does that mean that formal lockdowns are only responsible for the difference between that and whatever results they’re seeing? Note also that Sweden’s approach doesn’t seem to have improved its economic outcomes (their economic losses are projected to be larger than Denmark and Norway, who have more aggressive lockdowns – would like to know Gloominary’s reaction to this as well).
What do you mean by odd, and what specifically is it that you find odd? We’re in the middle of a once-a-century pandemic, so by many definitions everything about the current global situation is odd. Given that we’re in a pandemic, how likely is it that it was first identified in a city with a research laboratory dedicated to studying this kind of virus? That depends on how many such laboratories there are, how many of them are in places where diseases with pandemic potential are likely to jump from animals to people, how much likely such a disease is to be in an area where an above average part of the population is an expert in the disease that’s identified, etc.
Here is an article from 2006, about how multiple infectious disease labs were built in the area of China in which the 2003 SARS epidemic began, not too distant from Wuhan. Is that odd?
For US funding, what percent of labs that do this kind of work are US funded? We hear a lot about the Wuhan lab, but given that a lab is studying this kind of disease, how likely is it that the US is funding them? The CDC spent more than $600m in 2019 on “Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases”, of which about $750k went to the Wuhan lab ($3.7m over 5 years). Presumably some part of the remaining >$599,250,000 went to other labs, probably also located in parts of the world that have generated multiple potential pandemics in the past decade. Given that there’s a lab in a city with an outbreak, how likely is it that it’s a US-funded lab? Seems pretty likely.
As I said earlier, “I think the evidence justifies some suspicion that the origin of the pandemic is the lab.” I don’t think it justifies a strong belief about this, and I don’t think the US government connection is particularly meaningful.
