A Utilitarian Approach to Lockdowns

In this essay I employ a utilitarian framework that assumes fungibility of human life time to assess the effectiveness of Covid lockdowns in saving overall human life years. I want to preface this by saying: I am not a utilitarian, I am a deontologist. I am not a collectivist, I am an individualist. I believe the human in all his or her glorious individual sovereignty is the most precious creature in the universe. I do not believe that it is righteous to kill one man if you can harvest his organs in order to save 10 others. I would not go back in time and kill baby Hitler to prevent the holocaust. I would not kill one, at that time innocent, person to prevent the deaths of 40 million. I believe actions must be taken based solely on the direct effect they have on individual rights and freedoms, not by their net effect upon society. To do otherwise would turn man into a commodity and we have had more than enough of that throughout history.

CDC Covid Death Rate Statistics

Above are the fatality rates for each age group that contracts Covid as published by the CDC. I am going to perform a life gain/loss calculation for each age cohort based on some, I believe, reasonable assumptions. I am going to assume 6 months of lock down time. In reality it has already been 8 months and I suspect we shall get to next February before the Covid chapter concludes but I am trying to be generous here. To make the comparison I will use the formula below. If the output of the formula is greater than the time spent lockdown, the lockdown was a net benefit. If it is lower, then lockdowns were a net loss.

For the 0–19 cohort:

They all individually sacrificed 6 months of lifetime in order to gain on average (77–10) * (1-.99997) = .00201 years of life on average for every member of the cohort. 77 as that is current life expectancy for a 10-year-old. I chose 10 as that is the median age of this cohort. (Government Approved Actuarial Tables) So (77–10) is the additional life years expected for the average fifteen-year-old.

Each person gave up .5 years to get on average .00201 years back. This is giving up 182.5 days to get back .7 days. This is a mismatch of loss to gain of 248.75 (.5/.00201). So, this group sacrificed 24875% more lifetime than they gained from the shutdown. Also, this assumes a 100% infection rate which is impossible. If you throw in the 70% rate needed for herd immunity (Mayo Clinic Herd Immunity Estimates) then you actually get 24875/.7 = 35535.71% more life time lost than gained for the 0–19 aged cohort.

A few caveats to the above calculation. I am valuing time in lockdown as worthless which I don’t believe to be true. Although I do think a life of oppression is near worthless. If you think your time in lockdown has been half as enjoyable as your life before lockdown then you can divide the above number by half, It’s still a big number. Also, I am discounting the unpleasantness of the illness to zero. Naturally any illness is somewhat unpleasant. In my anecdotal case, with the symptoms I had, I would have discounted it to zero as it was over quite quickly and easily in my case. I lost a day and a half of time which is marginal to the above calculation measured in years. Another consideration is that lifetime is not fungible. Ask any 70-year-old how many days they would give up for one more day of youth. The answer will be greater than one. Too often throughout history we have sacrificed the youth of society to benefit the old and decrepit.

Onto the 20–49 cohort:

They also all sacrificed 6 months of lifetime in order to gain on average (78–35)*(1-.9998) = 0.0086 years. So, this cohort gave up on average .5 years to gain .0086 years. This is a .5/.0086 = 5800% loss to gain mismatch. They also got severely screwed but only (58/249) 23% as screwed as the 0–19 cohort. There is reverse ageism going on here. If you take out the herd immunity factor again it’s even higher.

Now for the 50–69 cohort:

They, once again, sacrificed 6 months of lifetime in order to gain on average (82–60)*(1-.995) = .11 years. For every half year of life they gave up they got .11 years in return. So, they got screwed to the tune of roughly 5x (.5 years/.11 years). The reverse ageism trend continues.

Now onto the calculation for the old and most vulnerable:

For people over 70, they, yet again, gave up 6 months of life to get (87–75)*(1-.946) = .648. So only for this group was giving up .5 years of lifetime worth it. They gained .148 (.648-.5) years net or a measly 1.776 months of extra life.

Keep in mind that the 70+ cohort is less than 10% of the US population so we engineered a massive theft from 90% of people to give a tiny benefit to the oldest 10%. (U.S. Census Data) Oh wait, I forgot to take out the 70% herd immunity estimate from our friends at the Mayo Clinic. (.648*.7) = .45 years. So actually the 70+ year olds gave up .5 years to gain .45 years. In summary, not a single age group gained any benefit from the lockdowns. This has been the greatest swindle perpetrated on the American people this century.

Another interesting way to frame it is the following. If you are 70 years old and get Covid your chance of dying from it is equal to your chance of dying before reaching 72 and 6 months from all other causes. (Here) is an actuarial table that shows your chance of death within any given year of life. I added the two values for 70 and 71, .022889 and .024869, plus half of the 72 value, (.027095/2) = .0135475. Adding these three together (.022889+.024869+.0135475) = .0613055 or 6.1%. Or a slightly larger number than the 5.4% (1-.946) Death rate cited above by the CDC for the 70+ cohort. This means that if you are age 70 and get Covid you are less likely to die from it as from just living the next 2.5 years of your live as you normally would. Covid is effectively equal to a doubling of the chance of death in the next 2.5 years for a 70-year-old from 6.1% to 11.5% (6.1+5.4). The biggest shock to me when looking at these actuarial tables is that a 70-year-old only has a 2.2% chance of dying before age 71. A 1 in 50 shot. Old people are tanks. It’s not until your 108th birthday where your chance of dying before you blow the candles out next year exceeds 50%. Numbers are weird.

My goal with this essay is to take something that very few people are thinking about logically and apply a few numbers to give some perspective. The fear of death is a powerful motivator but rarely a rational one. People are much more afraid of flying than driving but your chance of dying per mile of travel is 750x less while flying than driving. (Wikipedia on Transportation safety) Humans aren’t inherently rational. We experience things like recency bias. Like how air travel feels scarier when a plane has recently crashed. Since Covid is in the news now it feels very scary. But we need to strip out all the fear and hysteria and just calmly look at the facts. Sit down, take a breath, and realize your chance of dying from Covid is in fact quite low.