mindstalk | (Reply)

Welcome back!
Some good points about the strains. Though in his older column, Mike talks about 36,000 deaths, 28,000 of which would be preventable by full vaccination -- perhaps the remaining 20% takes your problems into account.

OTOH, economics: assuming the typical $30 charge covers costs, that'd be $9 billion to vaccinate everyone. 28,000 deaths would be $28 billion or more (x3) by some accountings of human life, though one might argue old people are worth less, or would cost us money in terms of cancer or Alzheimer's care. 5-20% of the population gets it, with 200,000 hospitalizations. To just look at workers, 300 million people, say 10% infected, say half of those employed... if 15 million people miss a week of work and average $600/week, that's lost output of $9 billion.

Or from an individual perspective, if you make $30,000/year, and have only a 5% chance of losing a week of work, the expected loss is $25, not counting utility loss from just plain being sick.

And you might not need to vaccinate everyone: again from his older column,

vaccinating seventy percent of children aged 5-18 could reduce influenza deaths by up to eighty percent. In other words, the grandchildren are killing their grandparents.

Anything wrong with these numbers?

(You have aroused Botec Man! See him calculate! Rar!)