MANY REGARD the idea of putting a price on human lives as morally repugnant. And yet that is the position in which many policymakers seemingly find themselves. Faced with the deadly covid-19 pandemic governments must decide how much economic disruption to tolerate in order to suppress the disease, or at least to slow its spread. President Donald Trump may have had the economic costs in mind when he tweeted on March 23rd, “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” Having mused about lifting lockdowns by Easter, he has since decided to maintain them until the end of April.

According to a new paper by Sergio Correia and Stephan Luck of the Federal Reserve and Emil Verner of MIT, the notion that reducing deaths from a pandemic necessarily hurts the economy is false. In their study, Mr Correia and his colleagues analysed America’s experience of the 1918 flu pandemic, commonly known as the Spanish flu, which infected 500m people around the world and killed as many as 50m. The 1918 flu hit young workers especially hard.

Like covid-19, it reached different places at different times, with local governments offering different responses. These included school closures, quarantines and restrictions on business hours. Mr Correia and his colleagues found that the American cities which experienced the highest number of deaths from the flu pandemic also tended to suffer the biggest hits to their economies (measured in terms of the decline of manufacturing output and employment). The fatality rate was highly dependent on public policies. The authors estimate that cities which imposed tougher-than-average restrictions suffered 560 deaths per 100,000 people, on average, compared with 730 per 100,000 elsewhere. They also found that governments which implemented stricter policies, such as banning public gatherings and shutting down churches and schools, fared better than those which pursued more lenient ones.

Policymakers battling covid-19 might not view the experience of the Spanish flu, even in places that fought it relatively well, to be something to aim to repeat. But economists tend to think that the aggressive policies in place to fight the covid-19 epidemic are desirable. A recent survey from the University of Chicago asked a group of prominent economists whether abandoning America’s lockdown, at a time when infections could surge again, would cause more economic damage than maintaining the restrictions. Forty-one per cent of those asked said they strongly agreed, 39% said they agreed, 14% said they were uncertain and 6% did not answer. None disagreed.