£4.8m per coronavirus death

[hamstersarse]

The cost of ‘managing’ the virus so far has been £213bn. This is just actual spend, not the losses from the economy and future unemployment costs etc.

There have been 44500 deaths in the UK

That means, we’ve spent £4.8m per cv death.

This is pretty extraordinary. NICE who have been around for many years, do the financial assessments on cost / benefits of new treatments and drugs and regularly ‘turn down’ new treatments based on a cost/benefit calculation.

I wonder how coronavirus would fare in their financial assessments? Would we really be able to justify this spend when considering all the other ways in which people are dying and perhaps not receiving similar amounts of spend?

Most of the spend is on further people NOT dying though, I don't know what the estimates currently are for death rate if we'd completely ignored covid but that's what the spend is mostly on, not on each death like in other treatment costs.

Ie, if you spend no more on cancer treatments than you currently are, no more people will die than currently do so you can do a cost analysis based on each death. This isn't the case for covid.

Crazy logic. The money is to avoid deaths, so it should be per person saved rather than per death.

Disingenuous figure as pp have said.
If you add up the costs of prevention and treatment of cancer and divide that by deaths due to cancer you get a big number too.

I don’t understand your thought process. Why are you using cost per death as a measure? Would it be better if there were more deaths so you could feel as though you were getting some sort of value for money? Surely the point of the expenditure is lives saved, and it would be preferable if there had been less deaths.

Eh? It's about lives saved not lost. By your logic, preventing more deaths would be worse because each death would cost more.

OP, the marker of good health management is to spend money to reduce death or harm. The fewer the deaths the higher the cost per death.

This article covers it quite well

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-lives-from-covid/amp

Of course it’s about saving lives, but resources are finite.

Based on the our spend on Covid however, we are effectively saying that each Covid victim is more worthy of saving than six or seven victims of other diseases?

We could spend more on cancer, diabetes, heart disease....but we don’t.

Add in the costs from the devastating impact on the economy and the financials costs will be much higher. Then add in the deaths caused by "managing the virus" by cancelling treatments and screening, suicides, and deaths linked to the economic impact. Also the impact on mental and physical health and suffering caused by isolation.

The costs are huge. Financial and in terms of the populations health and well being. The cost benefit analysis largely consists of the huge costs "may" limit virus spread and "may" protect an easily identifiable and small demographic who are vulnerable. Some lives are considered far more valuable than others.

So what are you saying, then? We should not bother and let things take their course? There are patients on cancer wards who are dying not of cancer but of Covid. Please outline your solution.

Problem is OP, you can't make that statement without knowing how many lives have been saved. Cost per death is absolutely meaningless.

Then add in the deaths caused by "managing the virus" by cancelling treatments and screening, suicides, and deaths linked to the economic impact

If you leave the virus unmanaged so that it spreads through hospitals, how many people do you think are going to get or survive treatments for other illnesses then?

@hamstersarse

Of course it’s about saving lives, but resources are finite.

Based on the our spend on Covid however, we are effectively saying that each Covid victim is more worthy of saving than six or seven victims of other diseases?

We could spend more on cancer, diabetes, heart disease....but we don’t.

But if you spent nothing at all on cancer, diabetes, heart disease there would be a set number of people every year who would die and obviously you want to bring that number down as far as possible but after a certain number they decide each additional person saved costs so much it's 'not worth it' (although horrible to think of it in those terms).

Covid, because it's a pandemic, is not the same though. Hopefully one day it will be, like flu, but it isn't now. If we did nothing about it and spent nothing on it the deaths would increase exponentially for the next year or two so every extra spent means extra lives saved as there's currently no 'lid' on how high the deaths could go.

Let's do the same imaginary calculations with say, measles.

The MMR vaccine costs between £110 - £70 to have privately. So let's say it's a £50 cost per measles vaccination. 700-750k babies born annually. So 37.5m annual cost. In the latest data I can find we have about 0.3-0.5 deaths a year due to measles. So measles vaccination costs us £75million per death!

Clearly terrible value and we should stop vaccinating.

Obviously that's not the case - we vaccinate to stop deaths and ALSO to stop long term debilitating effects. There's also the issue that while COVID has a death rate of X when properly treated, if hospitals are overwhelmed that death rate will increase further as patients won't be getting the treatment they need.

"We could spend more on cancer, diabetes, heart disease....but we don’t"

As well as what's been said, It could be argued that it doesn't matter how much money we throw at those conditions, until people change their lifestyles, they will always be a problem. To avoid Covid we would have to stop life as we know it and the trade off isn't worth it.

You absolute clown, all that money was spent to avoid deaths, the collapse of the NHS through being overwhelmed and the collapse of all parts of society through high absences when swathes of the population get sick at once. Muppet.

Op, your logic is way off.

You seem to be saying that is we'd spent the same but three times as many people had died, that would be preferable because the cost per death would be lower !

@hamstersarse

Of course it’s about saving lives, but resources are finite.

Based on the our spend on Covid however, we are effectively saying that each Covid victim is more worthy of saving than six or seven victims of other diseases?

We could spend more on cancer, diabetes, heart disease....but we don’t.

You're still using flawed logic. The money being spent is to save lives not kill people, so the correct measure is pounds per life saved nor death.

Nice approves interventions if the ‘cost per life year saved’ is below £20,000 to £30,000.
*
The* Covid measures cost just over £180,000 per life year.
*
These costs would be in line with the usual Nice threshold only if we had faced a 20 million life year loss. That would have required a disease as deadly as the 1918 influenza, which, barring the possibility of future lethal mutation, Covid-19 is not.*

So yes, we are as a society sacrificing and spending an awful a lot in view of the relatively little gain of life years.

Well Mr Cummings and his puppet PM tried the sit back and do nothing strategy (aka herd immunity) until mid-March. Boris was swanning around enjoying the Rugby World Cup and shaking hands in the hospital while the virus wa running rampant. Result was 60,000 excess deaths in a couple of months. The fundamental problem isn’t under or over management - the problem is making the measures effective. We heard a lot about “the right measures at the right time”. And yet we are the worst hit economically in the entire world. Complete and utter failure. Now our misery is going to be compounded by Brexit.

I'm pretty sure the money is spent to stop further death not spent on people that have died.

Op, you have a point. As a society we're spending a huge amount to save lives from coronavirus.

But we're spending it on 'life years saved'.

This article summarises it well (as linked below):

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-lives-from-covid/amp

It makes the point that we're spending almost £200,000 to save one life yea.

Nice normally approves interventions if the ‘cost per life year saved’ is below £20,000 to £30,000.

So the question is ‘how many lives have we saved?’

And the next question is ‘was it worth £215bn and rising?’