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I am going to take a controversial position and say that coronavirus is bad. As I write this, on March 15, 2020, 60 of our fellow Americans have been felled by the coronavirus. Five-dozen deaths is not a trivial amount, and there are surely going to be many more before things get back to normal.
Still, I sort of get what Donald Trump was initially trying to mumble his way through on this one. It’s weird which deadly threats we choose to do something about and which we just happily ignore.
Regular old influenza killed 79,000 Americans over the 2017-18 flu season. Over the 2018-19 season, we did a bit better, losing only an estimated maximum of 57,300 of our countrymen and countrywomen. The sum total of what we’ve chosen to do about this is hang up those little flyers around offices passively suggesting that people get a flu shot that is only going to be 40 percent to 60 percent effective anyway. If we shut down public life every flu season like we’re doing right now due to the coronavirus, we could absolutely save thousands of flu victims.
Flu is kind of the low-hanging fruit in this analogy, but all sorts of other preventable things are killing thousands of us every time we all walk out the door. We fatally drove our vehicles into each other 38,000 times last year in this country. We Americans fatally poisoned 69,029 of ourselves from February 2018 to February 2019, by going out and getting, and then ingesting, far too many drugs. We shot to death 39,773 of ourselves in 2017, the last year for which reliable gun death data is available. Lots of things we could have done to prevent these deaths would have fallen far short of shutting down international travel and tanking the economy. But we didn’t do much.
If you go outside today, you’re still way more likely to get creamed by a truck or shot by your neighbor than to develop a fatal case of COVID-19. But everyone’s collective panic about one new possible way to die is ironically going to have the unintended result of preventing a lot of us from departing apropos of the many way more likely ways to die that are already out there.
In 2013, researchers at the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing in the Netherlands released a comprehensive study looking at business cycles and mortality rates between 1950 and 2008 in 19 developed countries, including the United States. What they found is that a particularly strong economy can kill you.
“In developed countries, mortality rates increase during upward cycles in the economy and decrease during downward cycles,” one of the researchers, Herbert J. A. Rolden, wrote. For every one percent increase in GDP, researchers found that the death rate for older men (age 70 to 74) in developed countries increased by about a third of a percentage point. The death rate for middle-aged men (defined as those age 40 to 44) increased even more than it did for older men, by 0.38 percent. Surprising no one, a surging economy wasn’t quite as dangerous for women, but older women and middle-aged women still saw 0.18 percent and 0.15 percent increases in their mortality rates, respectively, for every one percent boost to GDP.
To give you an idea of what this means, the current overall U.S. death rate is 8.880 deaths per 1000 people, so a 0.38 percent increase in that would be about 8.914 deaths per 1000 people. In a country of 372.2 million people, that’s an extra 12,655 deaths per year.
Researchers haven’t exactly nailed down the mechanisms behind this effect. I’d say it’s pretty intuitive though to think that when more of us have money to drive around frivolously, to buy guns with which to shoot ourselves and one another, and to purchase unregulated drugs, probably more of us are going to die.
So, it’s strange that we’ve decided to take one threat seriously and basically shut down public life over the 60 American deaths it has caused (so far), while doing next to nothing about hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths we were already facing every single year. But hey, even if the threat posed by coronavirus turns out to be overblown, at least we’re not totally wasting our time here. The economic fallout from the coronavirus panic is probably going to be enough to save thousands who would have died of entirely different dangers but for all of us staying at home. We could do worse than doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.