A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week, from former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Harvard University economist David Cutler estimates that the coronavirus pandemic will cost Americans $16 trillion –about four times the output lost in the 2008-09 Great Recession. And these are just the US loss estimates. Read The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 trillion virus:
For a family of 4, the estimated loss would be nearly $200 000. Approximately half of this amount is the lost income from the COVID-19–induced recession; the remainder is the economic effects of shorter and less healthy life.
Output losses of this magnitude are immense. The lost output in the Great Recession was only one-quarter as large. The economic loss is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the US has fought since September 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.6 By another metric, this cost is approximately the estimate of damages (such as from decreased agricultural productivity and more frequent severe weather events) from 50 years of climate change.7
The authors note that investment in testing and contact tracing is essential and highly productive in the containment battle with projected economic savings 30 times the cost of the investment (ie., each $6 million invested in testing and tracing leads to averted costs of about $176 million).
In Ontario right now, testing is backlogged and taking up to a week for results. This is causing costly missed containment opportunities.
Meanwhile, many small businesses and employees are heading into another month of lost income. Ontario has had to reintroduce restrictions in Toronto, York, Peel and Ottawa amid the second wave of COVID-19. Here is a direct video link.
Alberta is evidently also fumbling the contact tracing ball, see: Alberta’s contact tracing raises red flags as 43% of new cases have no known source.
Of the 1,812 new cases reported in Alberta last week, 772 (43 per cent) have an unknown source. There are currently 2,836 active cases in the province, 1,054 (37 per cent) from an unknown source.
Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said she doesn’t like the look of those numbers.
“This is actually one of the cornerstones of reducing spread. If we can’t, basically, kind of find the ring of exposed people and prevent them from spreading it outwards, we’re going to be looking at really, really bad numbers. So it’s a big deal,” she said.
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