Even in Ferguson’s Worst Case Scenario, the Cost of Saving One Life From Covid is a Million Pounds
We’re publishing an original piece today by Glen Bishop, the second year maths student at Nottingham University who often writes for Lockdown Sceptics about the shortcomings of the models that SAGE has relied on throughout this crisis. In this piece, he does a back-of-the-envelope calculation to work out how much it has cost the Government to save one life from Covid. Not surprisingly, it is considerably more than the £30,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year that is the upper limit in the guidance the NHS relies upon when deciding how to allocate resources. Here is an extract:
Financially, the test for rationality of a response to public health is the one used, until the Covid hysteria, by the NHS and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). NICE is the body that decides whether treatments, technologies and medicines are beneficial enough to warrant their cost. The upper limit the NHS and NICE are willing to pay for a treatment yielding one extra quality adjusted life year (QALY) is £30,000. If £30,000 is the accepted limit that can sustainably be spent by society on giving an individual one extra quality year of life, then have lockdowns met this test? Even with Ferguson’s projections, they aren’t even close.
As mentioned, using the 500,000 deaths projection would lead to 372,000 lives having been saved. Conveniently the National Audit Office puts the cost of measures announced by the government by the end of March at £372bn. That would be, as readers will notice, £1 million per life saved. But again, taking QALYs lost per Covid death of seven years gives £143,000.
This is a cost per year of life nearly five times more than the £30,000 the Government previously deemed an upper limit for what was reasonable and sustainable to spend on treatments such as that for children’s cancer medication. Is it the Government’s or Professor Ferguson’s position that protecting somebody from Covid is worth spending five times more than protecting someone from cancer or do they not understand the realities of the policies they are implementing?
Worth reading in full.
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“using the 500,000 deaths projection” Worth considering the following, when contemplating the disgraceful reliance on modelling nonsense for serious matters of life, death and taxes, by our laughably misnamed “elites”: Imagination and remembrance: what role should historical epidemiology play in a world bewitched by mathematical modelling of COVID-19 and other epidemics? Basically says, though couched in very understated, academic terms, that the models are bollocks, and even though historical comparisons are also not precise, they’re far better than the “modelling” for getting an overall view. Some highlights: “Consultation of historical data reveals the significant similarities between the respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries in general….The infectivity and severity of SARS-CoV-2, whether assessed by statistical parameterisation (basic reproduction number and adjusted case or infection fatality ratios, respectively) or synoptic description (household attack rate, time to epidemic peak, and excess all-cause mortality rates), are well within the range described by respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries (where the 1918–20 influenza is the clear outlier)…Analogies to past pandemics can also provide an important check on the assumptions made during model construction. As an example, every established respiratory pandemic of the last 130 years has caused seasonal waves of infection… Read more »
When I try to do the calculation I get a divide by zero error
I think the reality in the Long run is probably worse than that, I suspect we have paid a fortune to kill more people through poverty and other consequences of Lockdowns.
I’m not quite sure I understand Glen’s point here? 13.9 days per person is calculated by dividing total life-years saved according to Prof F by the population of the country, which seems an artificial statistic to me.
However, I’m intrigued by the 7 years of quality life years cost attached to each covid death which Glen cites in the actuarial tables. I struggle to reconcile that figure with the fact that ~30% of deaths occurred in care homes where the median stay is ~15 months, the fact that well over 90% of victims had one or more serious co-morbidities, or the fact that both median and mean age of Covid death was about 1 year older than the corresponding median and mean for all-cause mortality. I’m surprised the typical Covid fatality (with or of) would have had 7 years life left, even without a quality threshold.
Add to it the fact that these people did not die of Covid, they died with it. The PCR test does not demonstrate causation. It’s obviously plausible that we are merely picking up the average rate of death, which has been offset by a few months because of a bug that’s been going around so it was temporarily skewed. That’s why excess deaths have been way below the five year average for the last few months.
Certainly agree with you on the 7 QALYs, I don’t think they properly account for the heterogeneity of the population who die from Covid. The closer you are to death the weaker you are and the more likely it is for covid to push you over the edge and the actuaries aren’t properly accounting for that. Nor that many of the infections were aquired in hospitals where obviously you are only there generally if you have something seriously wrong with you. They account somewhat for comorbidities but I certainly think it is lacking. The 13.9 days average is just to try and give people an understanding of the amount of life their personal sacrifices over the last 2 years has gained by ‘protecting’ people from Covid even if you take the stupid overestimates from Ferguson and the 7QALYs which I suspect is significantly lower also. So it is a very high upper bound for the sake of argument using SAGE projections. Obviously, it is somewhat artificial but it is important to try and help people understand the personal gain/sacrifice that has been asked of them over the year away from the big numbers. Few people can really rationalise numbers once… Read more »
Thanks for the clarification.
I definitely think that 7 year figure is worth a sniff around, because it don’t pass the smell test for me. Another profession adapting its standards to fit a narrative?
I was also impressed with your previous sleuthing into the Imperial model, and it’s lack of accounting of seasonality. It inspired me to have a look at the files they make available myself. I noticed that they seemed to use a standard probability for symptoms/hospitalisation/death etc for each age cohort, without regard for heterogeneity within age groups. This is significant when predicting the impact of a third wave when vulnerable younger people have been jabbed whilst their healthier peers haven’t. The higher risk factor is applied across millions of younger people without a reduction for the protection offered by a vaccine. Prof F never replied to my request for confirmation, and I wondered if you had seen the same?
Depressingly, I suspect most people are more motivated by whether they personally get to avoid Long Covid than how many QALY’s somebody’s Gran wins back. But keep up the good work.
another in the list of “stuff we people BTL worked out a year ago”.
Bargain !
Still believe Covid was over hyped to bring in ID, which Johnson said he would eat if ever asked to produce it. Wonder what the coercion was for agreeing to that.
if you ‘save one life’ and that life dies of their underlying health conditions a few weeks later, did you ‘save one life’?
NO!
By the time we end the lockdowns anyone who would have died from Covid will be dead anyway at this rate.
What appears to be missing from Glen’s analysis is the lifetime cost of no lockdown. This would of course depend utterly on how effective you think lockdowns are. But if you accept the estimate of 500,000 deaths then it is going to be pretty high in hospital care, lost labour etc
“This would of course depend utterly on how effective you think lockdowns are.” The evidence is not very promising for those that think they are effective.
Doesn’t it also depend on who you think those 500,000 people are?
“lifetime cost of no lockdown” – What? What the fuck are you going on about now?
If it is a lifetime cost then the figure to use is about 70M cos we all gonna go eventually.
“But if you accept the estimate of 500,000 deaths“
Only an imbecile or a liar would accept that literally stupid number as anything more than a scaremongering fantasy.
Pretty clear it’s used here as a fantasy upper bound with no plausible possibility of being equalled, let alone exceeded.
An of course the extra costs you mention pale into triviality next to all the unquantified costs of panic and lockdown.
Lockdown also saved them from being trampled by elephants.
And being hit by flying pigs
Well probably not, the 500,000 deaths scenario from Ferguson assumes that most die at home because hospitals are flooded anyway and it assumed the whole wave would be over by June 2020 so certainly lifetime cost of no lockdown would have been less. Then also add, if that were reality, decreased spend on pensions, CGT windfall for the government, reduced spending on social care for a few years after the event. NHS would have had a horrendous few months if that were the reality, followed by a very quiet few years as many of those who were close to death. Yet, very few economically productive people would have even needed time off work under that scenario because it assumes no isolation of infected. So reality sounds like social engineering or eugenics but if you want to do the accounting properly, it certainly isn’t the case that the lifetime cost of no lockdown outweighs the lifetime cost of lockdown. So I think, in this theoretical exercise, the reality would be the opposite to what you suggest.
I tried an ICL airfix modelling kit for a Lancaster Bomber – ended up with the fucking Graf Spee
What an amazing German bomber that was.
Most ICL modelling is Junkers…
And the ones who perform it are Fokkers…..
My Dad was a Lancaster pilot. He got torpedoed by a JU-88.
Regarding the issue of saving lives, it’s clearly a challenge now that we focus on ways to provide help to those who have been jabbed – and safeguard ourselves who haven’t. I include ourselves because there has been growing evidence of so-called ‘shedding’, where people who have not been jabbed are showing the same symptoms as those who have been jabbed when they spend time together.
Now I’ve already been mocked, tarred and feathered for raising this as a concern on LS. Shedding might be real, it might be more fear-mongering from controlled opposition, but I don’t think it should be flippantly dismissed when we know little about the effects of this non-vaccine.
I’ve started researching antidotes and have come across something called Suramin. I’m no doctor and have never heard of this stuff before, but apparently it is an extract from pine needles and inhibits blood clotting amongst other damage that can be done to your blood.
If anyone knows more about this or has other suggestions, please share.
I know nothing about Suramin. What I do know is that Zelenko has developed a prophylactic protocol for Sars-Cov-2 of 500mg quercetin, 1000mg Vit C & 25mg zinc once daily which has been successful in boosting one’s immune system. May be worth a go?
I’ve added these into my supplements to help me recover from Long Covid & since starting on them 3 weeks ago, I have started to make some progress. Apparently this combination helps to rid your body of the spike protein.
Has this cost you much money, Bertie? I’ve read several places about quercetin and zinc being very good at flushing your body of toxins and countering DNA damage. I’m certainly willing to give it a try and will try and urge my family to consider it. At the very least, I hope to get my mother safe from the non-vaccines she’s taken.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-medicines-covid-.html
Rutin is Quercetin. Known in anti-aging research
Yes, a friend who is a sceptic says she drinks pine needle tea. I don’t know more than that but she recommended it for shedding.
“NICE” is the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, isn’t it?
George Orwell, in a 1945 review, described the goal of the N.I.C.E. as follows:
Thanks once again to Glen, for showing the power of logical thought and the benefits accruing from a good education.
It says something damning about our system when a second year maths student at Nottingham University would run the country infinitely better than our current prime minister and cabinet…
Boris Quisling de Pfeffel Chamberlain
Hahaha, nice one Glen!
His real surname is Kemal.
Which is precisely why it has nothing to do with saving lives.
If you are unlucky enough to be struck down with MS, ALS, MND, ..ME.. you will quickly see how little the NHS and system (e.g. DWP) cares for you.