Your money or your life? Scott Moe's tragic miscalculation

[Jordy2323]

BS UpChuck

A death a day.

At this rate SK will become extinct in about 3000 years.

[Goodtime]

BS Chuck

[chuckChuck]

That's the best you can do there SF? I haven't seen too many debates won with two word answers! LOL

As Australia proved, taking effective measures and getting the pandemic under control early is better for the economy. As the article states, half measures actually prolong and deepen the damage.

[SASKFARMER]

BS Chuck

[chuckChuck]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/opinion-lewis-muhajarine-neudorf-1.5978305 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/opinion-lewis-muhajarine-neudorf-1.5978305

Your money or your life? Scott Moe's tragic miscalculation

Steven Lewis, Nazeem Muhajarine and Cory Neudorf · For CBC Opinion · Posted: Apr 07, 2021 5:00 PM CT | Last Updated: April 7

This Opinion piece was written by Steven Lewis, a health policy consultant formerly based in Saskatchewan, Nazeem Muhajarine, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and Cory Neudorf, a public health and epidemiology professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

Scott Moe won't budge. There will be no change in his pandemic control strategy, grounded in his belief about how the pandemic affects the economy.

To Moe it is a trade-off: the more you lock down, the greater the economic damage, which causes so much harm that it outweighs the benefit of keeping the virus at bay.

He categorically rejects the measures that kept infection rates, hospitalizations, and deaths low in Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Moe's go-to methods are pleading for voluntary behaviour change, implementing as few restrictions as possible as late as possible, and stalling for time until vaccines produce herd immunity. As he said on March 30, "the way through this is vaccines, the way through this is not more public health measures."

If the premier is right that major economic damage is the unacceptable price of a convincing victory over the virus, it becomes a pick-your-poison scenario: your money or your life.

This was an important theoretical debate at the beginning of the pandemic. After more than a year, the evidence to settle it is starting to emerge. It does not support Premier Moe's assumptions.
Looking at the data

An analysis published in Nature at the end of January looked at the relationship between restrictions on mobility in workplaces, the retail sector and recreational facilities (a measure of economic slowdown), and the COVID death rate in 33 highly developed jurisdictions, including Canada and 10 American states.

There's a lot of sophisticated math and method in the analysis, but here are the highlights:

Places that delayed imposing restrictions saw case numbers climb, resulting in more deaths.
Eventually, the alarming numbers forced these places to impose longer and more stringent lockdowns to get the pandemic under control. Over time they disrupted more economic activity than the countries that acted faster and more comprehensively at the beginning.
The longer duration — and stops and starts — caused greater economic loss in the end.

In short, many countries — including most of Canada — created a lose-lose situation where both people and the economy suffered needlessly.

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