How to assess the costs and benefits of lockdowns

“TO ME, I say the cost of a human life is priceless, period,” said Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York state. As they tried to slow the spread of covid-19 in the spring of 2020, politicians took actions that were unprecedented in their scale and scope. The dire warnings of the deaths to come if nothing was done, and the sight of overflowing Italian hospitals, were unfamiliar and terrifying. Before the crisis the notion of halting people’s day-to-day activity seemed so economically and politically costly as to be implausible. But once China and Italy imposed lockdowns, they became unavoidable elsewhere.Much of the public debate over covid-19 has echoed Mr Cuomo’s refusal to think through the uncomfortable calculus between saving lives and the economy. To oversimplify just a little, the two sides of the lockdown debate hold diametrically opposed and equally unconvincing positions. Both reject the idea of a trade-off between lives and livelihoods. Those who support lockdowns say that they have had few malign economic effects, because people were already so fearful that they avoided public spaces without needing to be told. They therefore credit the policy with saving lives but do not blame it for wrecking the economy. Those who hate lockdowns say the opposite: that they destroyed livelihoods but did little to prevent the virus spreading.