Cost/Benefit Balance
It should be stressed that these are scenarios – not forecasts. But we believe they cover high and low ends of a plausible range for both costs and benefits of lockdown. Tables 2 and 3 show the cost-benefit calculations of the lockdown based
on such ranges: In each cell, we report three numbers: benefits (+),
costs (-) and (in red) the balance of the two - all measured as £
billion.
For every permutation of lives saved and GDP lost the costs of lockdown
exceed the benefits. Even if lives saved are as high as
440,000, each of which means an extra 10 years of quality-adjusted life
– and when the lost output (assumed to be a sufficient and
comprehensive measure of all costs of the lockdown) is simply the likely
shortfall in incomes in 2020 – costs are still over 50% higher than
benefits of lockdown (benefits = £132 billion; costs = £200 billion). In
all other cases costs are a multiple of benefits. In most cases, costs
are 10 times or more the scale of benefits. This result reflects the
fact that the economic costs of the lockdown – even on the most
conservative estimate of £200 billion – is far larger than annual total
expenditure on the UK national health service (which runs at around £130
billion); the benefits of that level of resources applied to health and
using the NICE guidelines would be expected to generate far more lives
saved than is plausibly attributable to the lockdown in the UK.
Another way of making the same point is that the cost per QALY saved of
the lockdown looks to be far in excess (generally by a factor of at least 3 and
often by a factor of 10 and more) of that considered acceptable for
health treatments in the UK.