La race for life or, if you prefer, the war against Covid-19, has reached the second stage or battle. We don't know how many more there will be. The wish is that it is the last. But it looks like a hope not well planted in reality. Since to really start going back to a "normal" life it is necessary be vaccinated, with all that this implies in terms of time and field verification and on a large scale of effectiveness (although on the latter doing cacadubbi does not help anything or anyone).
However, it makes sense to start drawing a line and draw up a first budgetnecessarily provisional. We are well aware that we will write the final one, if we are lucky enough, in a few years.
There are two items in this budget: human lives lost e the damage to the economy as a result of the restrictions on social gatherings (there are others, of damage, even more significant, first of all on a psychological level).
Concerning human lives, let's just consider the deaths officially attributed to Covid-19. Setting aside both the issue of co-morbidity (that is, being already ill or otherwise suffering from some health deficiency), which has too often been brandished by deniers, out of ignorance, superficiality or shop interest. Both the question of deaths attributable to the virus but not attributable to it, because the dead are not swabbed (the so-called excess of deaths).
With regard to GDP, the change in 2020 does not count so much, but the difference between this and how much the economy would potentially have grown. Since potential growth is an almost metaphysical variable, as an approximation we have taken the annual trend in the period 2002-11.
Obviously, in determining the differences in human and economic losses they contribute many structural variables. For the former, for example: seniority, life expectancy, housing conditions, population density, social customs. For the latter: incidence of the most penalized activities (such as tourism), economic policies adopted, importance of the internal market compared to the weight of exports. But, as a first approximation, the two statistics appear sufficiently indicative.
And they don't talk at all! Instead, they should talk to each other, all right. According to those looking for a way to reduce the economic costs of the fight against the pandemic, without sacrificing lives (the unsaid, for those who make this type of "insurance" accounts, is that a few more deaths are acceptable), there is a trade-off between fewer deaths and lower GDP. That is, to save people, I lose more GDP. And viceversa. A difficult and painful political choice. Like the one imposed by King Solomon on the two mothers, the real and the fake.
Classifying the 53 nations, chosen here for representativeness, it emerges that in first place for least human losses is Taiwan, followed by Vietnam, Thailand, China, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela and Australia. At the bottom are the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Peru and Belgium. If the Lombardia was a nation ("It is!", we seem to hear the hoarse voice of the Senator Umberto Bossi), would be nc, because too detached from the others, with well 2.102 deaths per million, almost doubling Belgium, which is the worst in the world (1.397).
By lining up the same nations for the least loss of GDP due to the pandemic in first place we find Egypt, which was a whopping 14th in deaths, followed by China, Norway, Taiwan, Vietnam, Denmark, Ireland, Venezuela, Finland and Japan. At the bottom India, Palestine, Maldives, Peru and Iraq. Italy improves, rising to 36th place, but should be in the top five, to even out the death toll. There Lombardy would be 47th; the famous locomotive trudges along: according to the estimates of REF searches it loses one point of GDP more than the Italian average this year, while it should soar well above other countries, again to compensate for the human lives lost.
Why do the two rankings speak so little? Simple: why the lockdown hammer is an extreme remedy for an extreme evil. If you use it, it means that we have not been able to follow the virus and confine it, and you're forced to shut everything down because you don't even know where it is, i.e. how many people are really infected. If, on the other hand, you have the ability to test and trace and isolate infected people (Taiwan, South Korea, China, Japan, where masks and gloves were already used, regardless, as Totò would have said) and/or the political courage to go into lockdown as soon as a few cases arise (New Zealand), then deaths and/or damage to the economy are limited.
The proof lies in the relationship between deaths and official cases (Case Mortality Rate, CMR). If this is very low, you have good testing and tracing and narrowing capabilities. The opposite if it is high. A high CMR can also mean that the most fragile segments of the population (the elderly, such as the chronically ill) have not been adequately protected (for example, by letting the virus enter nursing homes).
As expected, in the first places for CMR we find the countries that have done better in terms of saving human lives and protecting the economy. Italy, on the other hand, is at the bottom. And Lombardy is worse than Italy. The exception in this case is China. This is explainable: having faced the virus first, it was taken by surprise and therefore had to shut down the economy. Then he refined his testing and tracking methods. In fact, its CMR from May onwards is 1,31% and in recent months it has been zero.
The conclusions leap to mind. But one, for those who are harder on the uptake (and more attached to the cadrega, as Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo would say, in the admirable sketch on the Count Dracula) is that the Lombard healthcare model has proved to be a failure. Whether to refound or reform it is an uninteresting terminological question.
