Lockdown Consequentialism

 Like many places, Toronto is going into a Covid lockdown. While not as dramatic as the Australian Reicht moves, I thought I'd do a simple analysis.

Sounds like they've had 8 Covid deaths today.  Let's assume it would get a factor of 10 worse without the lockdown.  That would be 80 deaths a day.

Let's assume a Toronto level lock-down affects only 2 hours of people's day M-S. You can't go to a movie. You can't hang out with friends. It's a net quality of life bummer of 2 hours a day for your 29h free time week (M-F = 3h, S-S=12h).  For people like me, the psychological burden of authoritarianism is MUCH higher. But, this seems reasonable. Lots of people just watch TV. And many people will just ignore dumb rules (hence Australian authoritarianism).

So with 6 million people in Toronto locked up for a stratified problem, we get 12 million people hours (1.2 x 10^7 )of lock up each day.  A lifespan of 80 years is about 700,000 hours.  80 deaths mean about 6 x 10^7 equivalent hours of life.  That's about a fair trade off.

But, we have to assume that people dying aren't losing a life from age 0. Kids rarely die from Covid (99.997% survivability in 0-19). So I made up a simple spreadsheet based on Canada's demographics and CDC relative death risks by age group and found the total number of early-death-hours based upon an expected lifespan of 80 years.  For 80 deaths I get 1.6 million early-death-hours.  

Thus, the covid lock-down will save 1.6 million early-death-hours each day at a cost of 12 million hours of meaningful lock up.  So your lock up time to loss of time ratio needs to be about 10:1 to break even. That means you would rather lose 1 hour of your life if you got 10 hours of meaningful freedom.

Lock-downs are close to a washout.  They don't really save any more life-time than they cost.  All you get out of them is a sense that you're doing something at the cost of absolute destruction of 

• the economy, 
• people's enjoyment of life, 
• trust in government, 
• and decrease in social support net (due to deficit costs).  

What probably happens is we have to work more to pay for our lockdowns (due to increase tax rates). Therefore the lock down hours of life saved are probably more than made up for by the loss of life-freedom-hours and tax-workload-hours.

I'll take Liberty and a Stratified response please.....