Congratulations! You Are Now More Valuable!

On New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Facebook page there is a video (Job One Has To Be Save Lives) of the Governor addressing the current shortage of ventilators in the state. About 1:10 into the video, the Governor says: “No American is going to say ‘accelerate the economy at the cost of a human life’, because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

I beg to differ with the Governor. Our Federal Government has said “how much a life is worth.” In fact, this being the Federal Government, three different departments have come up with three different values for a single human life.

Let us begin with the Department of Transportation, which in February of 2011 valued a human life at about $6 million. (This figure, and the figures for the EPA and FDA that follow, were taken from a New York Times article “As US Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret”, written by Binyamin Appelbaum, and published February 6, 2011. The hyperlinks embedded in the NY Times online article, which used to take the reader to government websites, are, alas, no longer active. But these numbers seem to be supported by other sources. See, for example, Green Hell a 2009 book by Steven Milloy, p. 62.) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, $6 million in February of 2011 is worth $7 million in February of 2020. (The figures for March are not yet in.)

The Food and Drug Administration is much more generous. In the Times article mentioned above, the FDA valued a human life at $7.9 million, or $9.2 million as of February, 2020. But the leading government agency, in terms of the value of a human life, is the Environmental Protection Agency, which placed a 2011 value of $9.1 million on a human life, or $10.6 million today. So according to our Federal Government, a human life today is worth somewhere between $7 million and $10.6 million.

I have a different way of using government statistics to measure the value of a human life. The loss in Gross Domestic Product for 2020, due to the virus, is estimated to be $2.3 trillion. (Let’s write that out, as we seem to be tossing trillions of dollars here and there: $2,300,000,000,000. We can tick off one trillion seconds every 32,000 years. In order to spend the money in the recent “stimulus” package in one year, we would have to spend about $64,000 every second, 24/7, for the entire year. That is on top of our normal spending of about $128,000 every second of the fiscal year.) $2.3 trillion ain’t pocket change.

So we have the cost. The question is the denominator. How many people will die?

We can use the estimate I keep hearing, that we could have as many as 200,000 deaths. I think that figure is terribly high, but we can go with it. If so, each death is worth nearly $11.5 million! Congratulations! You really are worth more than you thought!

But what if the death rate is much lower? There was a paper published just a couple of weeks ago, not in some lunatic right wing journal, but in a peer-reviewed, rather prestigious journal, The New England Journal of Medicine. There were three authors, all M.D.s. You have probably heard of one of the authors, a fellow named Anthony S. Fauci. This paper, Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted, contained the following interesting tidbits:

“On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

That is great news! It may have a fatality rate no worse than the good old ordinary flu

So what are the numbers for the flu? According to the CDC website, the estimates for flu illnesses between October 1, 2019 and March 21, 2020, are as follows: 38,000,000 – 54,000,000 flu illnesses, 24,000 – 62,000 flu deaths.

Using the higher figures for both deaths and illnesses, we have a fatality rate of 0.115%. At the time this was written, there have been 351,890 confirmed cases in the United States, with 10,377 deaths, for a fatality rate of nearly 3%. These are confirmed cases only, and we really have no idea how many unconfirmed cases were mistaken for the flu. It is likely that there are more actual cases than confirmed cases. (Remember Dr. Fauci’s comment: “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases . . .”) This allows us to put the fatality rate in a range from 0.12% to 2.95%. This makes the infection much less hazardous than either SARS or MERS.

And now, the last bit of math. We are shutting down the economy, and losing approximately $2.3 trillion, with the hope that we can keep the number of deaths down at the current level, about 10,377. We know there will be more deaths, so let us use the number of deaths from influenza (62,000), as a reasonable estimate of how this will end. That puts the value of a human life at nearly $37.1 million.

Again, CONGRATULATIONS! You really are quite valuable.