What Is the Cost of a Quarantine Bagel? Maybe Dave's Life . . .

On Tuesday at his daily press briefing, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that the economy and public health are not an either/or scenario. He's right, of course. An increase in public health is going to help the economy. But he also said something that's patently false. 

“But if you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy then it’s no contest, no American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life because no American is going to say how much a life is worth.”

This is logical silliness. We HAVE to put a value on human life. It can't be worth nothing-- then you're Stalin. It can't be sanctified and worth an infinite amount, because then you can't allocate resources. 

Plenty of Americans say how much a life is worth. Americans that work in federal agencies that decide whether a regulation is too costly to enact. Car manufacturers say how much a life is worth when they decide which safety features to add to their vehicles and which to leave out (and how much to charge for them).  Actuarial workers say how much a human life is worth on a daily basis.

Professor W. Kip Viscusi says how much a human life is worth. He gets specific about it.

Often, these federal agencies rely on Viscusi's number. Back in 1982, one statistical human life was worth 300,00 dollars, but Viscusi revised this figure. He used data on dangerous jobs-- he looked at how much more a worker needed to be paid to accept a job that had a higher risk of death. He came up with three million dollars per statistical life-- ten times the old amount. Because of inflation, that number is now estimated by the federal government to be around 10 million dollars. 

Planet Money Episode 991: Lives vs. the Economy give an excellent rundown of this math (along with an interview with Viscusi himself!)

And that's why I was able to go and get bagels yesterday morning. We haven't completely shut the economy down. We are still allowing people to shop at Wal-Mart and get take-out food and go to the grocery store as many times a week as they'd like. We're still delivering and receiving mail. We're still ordering from Amazon. 

Do these things spread the virus? 

Absolutely, but at a lower rate than normal. But not at a rate of zero. If one human life were priceless, we'd have to shut it all down. We'd get one chance every two weeks to go to the grocery store. We'd be eating beans and rice. By leaving some businesses open, we're making a cost/benefit decision and putting a price on the lives that will be lost because social distancing is fairly voluntary. And imperfect, as you will learn at the end of this post, when I describe my journey to buy bagels.

We'll keep making these decisions, balancing public health and the economy, and recognizing that plenty of people WILL be deciding what a statistical human life is worth. That's why the speed limit isn't 15 miles an hour. If it were, we would save many many thousands of lives, but we've decided that those lives are worth time and convenience. How many statistical lives are 50,000 jobs worth? I don't know, offhand, but someone is going to have to make that decision. The same way we know opening bars will lead to some drunk driving deaths and some cirrhosis of the liver. And some spread of Covid-19. At some point, that number will be low enough that we will reopen. But it's never going to get to zero.

Some people are better at minimizing the risk than others. That's baked into the system. I don't seem to be very good at minimizing the risk. 

Yesterday, I went to the La Bagel in Edison. I put on my mask, picked up our order, and carried it back to the car. The place was busy: four customers and four people working. One of them was a uniformed health care worker. Everyone wore masks, but still. The virus is around.

I got my bagel toasted and with cream cheese. I had never gotten my bagel toasted before, but my wife gave me this option. La Bagel is only a four-minute ride from my house (three minutes, really, because there's no traffic) but I decided I needed to eat my toasted everything bagel with cream cheese NOW. In the car on the ride home. I was hungry.

I didn't realize that the cream cheese would be slightly melted from the toasting. I got cream cheese all over my hands. I licked the bulk of it off-- which is probably not proper pandemic hygiene. Then I put the bagel down on the console so I could find some napkins. After getting the napkins out of the bag, I noticed that I put the bagel down on a pair of used gloves. Also probably not proper pandemic hygiene. But I ate it anyway, of course.

In the next few minutes, I got cream cheese on all kinds of surfaces, including my mask. I licked my fingers clean and ate a bagel that had touched my mask and some gloves. 

I'm not a doctor. 

I don't have this protocol down pat. I'm like most people. And we still have a whole mess of people behaving like this, so the virus will spread, slowly. Hopefully, slowly enough. But this is a tough adjustment for me. 

I'm used to teaching in a classroom all day. Kids cough on pieces of paper and then hand them to me. The desks are sticky and gross. There's never enough tissues. I touch my face, pick my nose (you can't teach with a booger) and cough all kinds of droplets into the air. I'm used to seeing one or two sick kids in every class I teach. They slobber on the desks and blow their noses. And I don't even want to get into the bathroom passes . . . yikes. This is business as usual when you do five 45 minute classes a day. There's no way we're going to be able to control the situation inside the schools, but we're eventually going to open the doors anyway. 

Here are a couple of other good podcasts on this topic:

Making Sense with Sam Harris: 198

Freakonomics 413: Who Gets the Ventilator?