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We have a well accepted value range of the spending required to save a life when evaluating public safety infrastructure projects, which is about $2-5m. It's noticeable that the Downer "restart now" types never try and run the BCA on that basis - because it ain't on their side.
Doing some very quick and dirty work, if you take the Diamond Princess mortality rate of 2% and assume the disease reaches 100% of the population in a "herd immunity" style, then the approximate economic damage is about 100% of GDP. Which is generally considered "quite a lot".
If we're being a lot more charitable, we can take the lowest mainstream estimates of about 0.5% mortality, and assume herd immunity involves a 70% infection rate. Then the economic damage *solely due to the immediate cost in lives lost* for Australia is 20% of GDP.
So if you're a right-wing pseudo-economist trying to benchmark partial shutdowns against the full-steam-ahead plan that some of the UK's crazier advisers wanted, then you need to factor a 20% GDP hit from deaths alone into your model, even before treatment and knock-on costs.
(and even after you've factored healthcare costs and lost production from sick people in: if you think a society where all that's going on is going to be otherwise productive-as-normal, then you're running on some extremely strange Stakhanovite-but-for-capitalism assumptions)
