Tuesday 30 March 2021

Economic Impact of Lockdown

The two factors that have had the greatest impact on us over the last year have been the impact of Covid on the capability of the NHS and the impact of lockdown on the economy. 

It has only just struck me, but while we've been inundated with data resulting from modelling of the spread of Covid by various university research groups, we've hard absolutely nothing about the modelling of the impact of lockdown on the economy.


Yes, we have numerous analyses of the effect of the lockdowns after the fact, but no forecasts at all at the point of lockdown - or if we have, they haven't been filling the news.

If, as we've been told, that the government was prioritising the economy at the start of the pandemic, then surely there must have been a model of the economic impact to balance the health impact in order for them to base their action on?

How many deaths, for example, are considered acceptable against what percentage drop in GDP? Almost every decision contains an element of risk, such as traffic speed vs risk of traffic deaths - a certain number of deaths have to be considered acceptable, else we'd all be crawling around in our cars


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