The reopener’s dilemma: Your money or your life

How many deaths are an acceptable price to pay to restart the economy?

That macabre question confronts political leaders everywhere, writes Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, because in the continued absence of either a vaccine or a cure for Covid-19, any move to lift stay-at-home orders and to relax restrictions on commerce will involve a trade-off in some number of additional infections and fatalities.

The shutdowns that have hobbled the economy and thrown 22 million Americans out of work have also clearly saved many thousands of lives. Some models predicted two million deaths in the U.S. if nothing was done; with social distancing precautions, the figure seems headed for something closer to 60,000.

Assessing whether shutting down — or reopening — is worth the cost means doing something many people find heartless: putting a dollar value on a human life. Government analysts do it all of the time.

For example, 41,000 deaths from opioid overdoses were valued in 2015 at $431.7 billion, or about $10.5 million per person, according to a recent White House report. Using that figure, if the shutdowns around the country were to save roughly two million lives, they would be worth a total of about $21 trillion — more than 10 times the cost of the recent $2 trillion relief package.

Some advocates of rapid reopening have offered a similar cold-eyed calculus, arguing that the immense economic harm being done by the shutdowns far outweigh the value of the additional lives that may be saved by keeping them in place.

Of course, it may not be as simple as that. Reopening the economy earlier may not pay dividends in the long run, and may actually do more economic harm, if the virus came roaring back and shredded public confidence.