For a long time, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro did not want to know about far-reaching measures against the spread of corona. He feared that the consequences of a lockdown, for example, would be more serious than the epidemic itself. “We have to be realistic. We all die once.”
“We can’t make the drug worse than the disease,” tweeted US President Donald Trump on March 23. Shutting down the economy to fight corona “probably causes more deaths than the virus itself,” he said.
Bolsonaro has now softened his tone and sees the epidemic as “the greatest challenge of our generation”. Trump has since announced that all social distancingmeasures in force in the US until at least the end of April.
But didn’t the two presidents actually have a good point? After all, the measures to combat the pandemic will hit many countries economically, and by no means all countries can temporarily provide financial assistance to their inhabitants, as is the case in the Netherlands.
Higher mortality rate
A protracted recession could even lead to a higher death rate, says economist Mathijs Bouman. “In a really deep depression, when the economy is really going down and there really is no money left for anything, there is always a lot of cutbacks in health care and other things that affect health and happiness.”
“In a protracted, deep depression, if rich countries were really going to get poor because of this misery, we might relapse and die more than if we hadn’t taken action.”
It is not without reason that Bolsonaro continues to emphasize: “Saving lives remains my main concern. Both of those we lose due to the pandemic and those affected by unemployment, violence and hunger.”
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Fewer deaths in a short recession
Still, a recession for the death rate doesn’t have to turn out badly, says economist Christopher Ruhm. He investigated the influence of economic crises on the mortality rate. “Research shows that in a typical recession, health improved in some areas.”
“People drive less when things are going bad economically, which means there are fewer traffic accidents. There is also less air pollution. There are fewer deaths from heart attacks and respiratory diseases.”
Bouman: “You would think that in a recession the mortality probability increases because people become unhappy, out of work, maybe get into alcohol. But you see that during a recession mortality usually decreases.”
Whether that will also be the case is still very uncertain, Ruhm emphasizes. “We have never had a recession from a deadly disease. The bottom line is, there are two phenomena facing each other and you don’t know which one is going to win. Much depends on how adequately we respond to the dangers of the virus.”
Did we save enough happy years?
If our corona approach proves to be adequate and the recession is severe but short, there seems to be little going on. Economically, this scenario does not do too much damage in the long run, and may even be positive for the mortality rate.
Nevertheless, Bouman has a side note to this: “We are now comparing human lives, but it is also about happiness in life. Are we now not making life very miserable for many people for half a year because of all these measures? enough happy years? How much luck do we actually save with the measures? ” These are questions that economists are also unlikely to find an answer to.
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