Coronavirus deaths are valued differently to other deaths and the lockdown would never have been introduced if quality of life was factored in to the decision,
Lord O’Donnell, former cabinet secretary said “when the benefits of the lockdown are not as great as the costs of continuing with it – it should be stopped”.
And Lord O’Donnell said if that had been the case: “It wouldn’t actually mean we would go to lockdown ever. We would never have gone that far.”
Lord O’Donnell was part of a programme at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics who have released a framework to determine when to release the COVID-19 lockdown.
Their research is based on analysing the impact of many factors such as incomes, unemployment, mental health, air quality and death rates with a view to understanding when the costs of continuing the lockdown exceed the benefits. These factors are brought together using a common currency of their impact on individuals’ wellbeing.
Professor Lord Richard Layard, Director of the Wellbeing Programme at the CEP, said: “All policy decisions should be based on a common metric of how they affect the wellbeing of the people. Now is the time to apply this metric to the hardest decision of our times.”
Lord Gus O’Donnell, Visiting Professor of the Wellbeing Programme at the CEP, said: “This work provides, for the first time, a framework for bringing together the impact of the virus on different aspects of people’s lives.”
He added:
“If you look at the government’s five tests that it wants met before lifting restrictions, what they are really all about are the number of deaths and the number of cases. They do not take account of the wider reality of this lockdown on wellbeing, which is what this framework attempts to do.”
