Trading Off Consumption and COVID-19 Deaths

Abstract

This note develops a framework for thinking about the following question: What is the maximum amount of consumption that a utilitarian welfare function would be willing to trade off to avoid the deaths associated with the pandemic?The answer depends crucially on the mortality rate associated with the coronavirus.If the mortality rate averages 0.81%, taken from the Imperial College London study, our answer is 41% of one year's consumption.If the mortality rate instead averages 0.44% across age groups, our answer is 28%.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 121 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.