Main Edition
US
FR
April 14, 2020 - 4:32pm
Will a recession caused by the coronavirus lockdown kill more people than it saves? That’s been an argument made by a few corona-sceptics since this crisis began, and their number may increase as the lockdown drags on.
Epidemiology is so outside of my field of expertise I don’t feel I need to have an opinion — people don’t need to have opinions on everything — but I am curious about the argument that a recession will cost lives, because I know that historically that is not true.
During the Great Depression, for example, death rates went down, mainly because people were drinking less and driving less; no doubt they were also a lot less happy, but as long as a country is wealthy enough for its citizens to eat and access basic medical treatment, recessions don’t necessarily kill people. In fact it’s often the case that good times are worse; for example, in occupied France the country’s historically very high levels of cirrhosis absolutely fell through the floor.
So I was interested to see (via Jonathan Portes) economist Angus Deaton making these same points in a webinar on “Deaths of Despair” (the subject of a book he co-authored, published last month). In his talk he points out that “all-cause mortality rates have fallen in Greece and Spain in [the] financial crisis” and that in the “Great Depression, mortality rates [reached] record lows.”
The reason for this is that “accidents of all sorts are low: highway, construction etc. Alcohol consumption goes down, esp. binge drinking. Pollution down, important for infant mortality”, and that less contact reduces infections (and murders). While suicides go up, they represent only 2% of deaths.
Already crime is down across the west, and I imagine road accidents too; I barely see any cars these days during my brief walk around the prison yard. Only the other day a bridge collapsed in northern Italy, but because of the lockdown no one died. Compare that to the 2018 Ponte Morandi collapse, which killed 43 people.
This is not to deny that a recession will be appalling, just that we should be sceptical of the argument that it will kill more people than the coronavirus. Covid-19 is an infectious illness with a fatality rate thought to be in the region of 1%, and without a lockdown it would likely kill considerable numbers of non-elderly people who would otherwise have many years of life ahead of them. The main moral argument for opposing a strict lockdown, that more people would die from the economic fall out, seems shaky at best.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe author lacks imagination…
It seems that the worst thing he can imagine happening as a result of our lockdown, is a recession. But this is not the case.
The system that puts food in the shops today, is quite complex, with many dependencies that are not understood – by anyone. The arrogance of the present policy is the belief that there are “experts” who know which activities are “essential”, and which are not. Actually they don’t know, and nobody does. Indeed it is certainly the case that, because much of Britain’s food is imported, we are depending on “experts” out side of Britain to make the correct decisions about what activities are essential.
In normal times, there is quite a bit of redundancy in this system. As a simple example; if one petrol station isn’t open, another is. If one lorry repair facility isn’t open, another is. “Oh” you say.., “They are deemed essential and may remain open” Yes.., but have you noticed? – they have very few customers now. In fact, some are closing because they have no trade. A huge portion of the daily business they need to remain open is associated with activities that have been deemed “non-essential”. And so on… This is happening across the world. It’s entirely likely that deliveries to some of our markets depend on a server farm in some other nation, and who knows for how long that will function? What lockdown provisions has the local government made that might cause it to go offline?
Now, I am not arguing that London will be without food next week. I think the risk of food deliveries to London stopping in the next week is very low. But in four weeks..? Six weeks? The risk of severe food shortages, after four more weeks of global lockdown is not zero. What is it? I don’t know – but neither does anyone else. I think it is certainly over 10%, maybe over 20%. That is too big a risk. If it happens, chaos will result, probably with much loss of life. And, restarting the system after a period of chaos will be infinitely harder than doing it before.
What we are undertaking, is a massive exercise in risk transfer. Young people have a vanishingly small chance of dying from this disease. It’s not zero, but it is very small. Their chance of dying if food deliveries stop and chaos ensues is not low. Old people (and I am one) are much more likely to die from the disease. What we are doing, is lessening the risk of old people dying.., by increasing the risk of young people dying. For a few weeks, it is a good tradeoff, as the risk was low. We might be reaching the point where the risk is growing and it is no longer an acceptable tradeoff.
This considers only a rather short time scale. If economic growth and technological development are set back, the knock-on effects may in a sense be permanent: we may be forever six months or a year behind where we would otherwise have been. The cost of every life-saving innovation for the entire future history of the human race arriving six months later is potentially astronomical.
It is important to choose one’s words carefully when writing these sorts of articles – recession implies a mere hiccup in the economic activity before everything returns to normal. If, however, the current situation does lead to a prolonged worldwide economic depression on the scale some are predicting, then the facts and figures for mortality rates quoted in the article may be meaningless. While mortality rates may decrease during a recession the ONS are already reporting an extra 3000 unexplained weekly deaths for week 14 of 2020. Diverting NHS resources to squash Covid19 may well be a factor here. People die from things other than Covid19.
The CMO has been talking about the risks of secondary deaths right from the outset. It’s too early to know why we have this spike in excess, non-Covid deaths but I suspect the over-excitable tone of media coverage may have played a part in stopping people coming forward for treatment. Now we can be fairly confident that the NHS is going to cope, perhaps we can urgently resume cancer treatments etc.
It’s not only an argument about health vs. money, it’s really much more complicated than that. I do have some doubts about the claim that lockdown is going to kill lots of healthy old too.
If a recession is the level of economic setback we get away with from all this, we can thank our lucky stars to have dodged a bullet. Serious commentators are talking about a depression, even Great Depression-levels of adverse economic impact. This could lead to enormous and unpredictable geopolitical pressures and consequences. Saying deaths fell during the Great Depression without at least acknowledging the role it probably had in the ghastly direction the world took in the 1930s is basing one’s hopes on a rather narrow data set.
The main claim is just factually untrue, please have a look at this useful website which is a mine of data, and a few examples can demonstrate that mortality per thousand climbed from around 2010 on, with a possible association with the economic recession, which often was a reversal of previous trends towards lowering the death rate.
Spain 8.4 to 9.2 per 1000 from 2010 to 2019 https://knoema.com/search?q…
UK 9.1 to 9.4 from 2010 to 2019 https://knoema.com/search?q…
Greece 9.1 in 2002, 9.8 in 2010 and 11 in 2019 https://knoema.com/search?q…
To calculate the number of extra people dying each year multiply the rate x (country’s population/1000). So, e.g. Greece, roughly 10 million people, 19 thousand extra people dying in 2019 compared to the same population in 2002. UK, 0.3 * (66 000000/1000)=19.8 thousand additional people dying in 2019 compared to the situation where 2010 death rate was maintained.