[ad_1]
In hindsight it is easy to do better, the problem is when the same mistakes are repeated. And we, with the second wave of coronavirus, are going back on the same path. Errors included. We’re slicing the company into business categories: stumbling schools, bars closed at certain hours, shopping malls closed on weekends, red zones. So it started last winter, after a few weeks we were all prisoners at home. Let’s be clear: the strategy has its own logic, to prevent the spread of Covid. But the virus does not act by profession, it does not choose geographical areas, it does not look at the clock. It proliferates for free, it spreads, it is its nature.
But looking for numbers, as this column does, also means digging deeper. Find out what those numbers mean, how to interpret them. Today we will analyze two: 224 and 4.5. The first is how much the closure cost us this winter. Awesome, right? The second is how much it could have cost, in hindsight.
In Turin, there are three professionals who often listen on the phone during the first lockdown. Or rather, in video call. They also do very different jobs, but they all gravitate around the Einaudi Center and they are all passionate about the same problem: how to prevent society from dying while avoiding the dead?
It all started with the observation of Gianpiero Pescarmona, doctor and biochemist at the University of Turin. While looking at the epidemic curve, Pescarmona began to study how the virus works and discovered what is now known with some degree of scientificity: the coronavirus does not affect everyone in the same way. Its most harmful effects are reserved for the elderly and infirm. According to data from the Higher Institute of Health, the average age of deaths from Covid is 80 years. The average number of illnesses that affected these people is 3.4. Only 3.8% of the deceased had no previous pathology and only 399 people (1.1% of the 35,563 deaths used as a sample) were under 50 years old, 87 of them under 40 and of the last 64 had cardiovascular diseases , kidney, psychiatric, diabetes or obesity. It is not really a trawling, the profile is quite delineated.
Covid free, but fragile protected
When fighting an invisible enemy, you shoot at the stack, risking killing your allies as well. But when you know him better, why not take aim? Pescarmona made a hypothesis: what if instead of closing all the businesses, only the fragile people are locked up, that is, the elderly and the sick? You could leave the activities open and without risk of massacre. Giuseppe Russo, director of the Einaudi Center, who is also fortunately an economist who is an expert in cost benefit analysis, liked the idea very much. So Russo began to study the hypothesis from his point of view.
Here we find our first number: 224 billion. Russo calculated that each day of the confinement it cost us 4,235 million euros between the loss of production, the loss of consumption, the induced failure (if they do not cut your hair or those who sell you shampoo win) and the drag effect of GDP (if you lose 9% in one year and think you can bounce back 6 next year you still have a 3% gap to get back to where you were when the crash happened). The daily cost of closing, multiplied by the 53 days of closing, is in fact 224,000 million euros.
99% savings
But what if only fragile workers were sent home? Here the calculation becomes interesting. Out of an audience of 18.1 million employees in Italy, only 1,303,200 are fragile and unable to perform smart work activities. If they were sent home, temporarily replaced by younger or stronger workers, they would be safe from Covid. Of course, it should be compensated. More or less like when you are sick. For the State, this compensation would cost 162.77 million euros per day (the average salary of an employee is 124.90 euros per day). However, this expense should be subtracted 76.19 million of positive impact on the economy. Now, in fact, you have a host of new replacement workers who were previously out of the job market. People with a salary, capable of spending and consuming. This is good for the economy. Multiplying the remaining daily expense by the 53-day lockdown, our closure would have cost just € 4.5 billion.
But if I leave all activities open, won’t the infection gallop?
In hindsight, of course, it would have been a good saving. What if we used this system today? Now we have to face another problem: what happens to contagion if all activities remain open? This is where the third star of last winter’s video calls comes in. This is Pietro Terna, a retired economics professor who specializes in forecasting models. Terna has created a fantastic tool: he has recreated the Piedmontese company on a scale of one to a thousand with software. The inhabitants of your virtual microworld have the same characteristics (in percentage scale) as the real ones: age, pathologies, profession. They move by public or private transport. They meet people on the weekends. They have exchanges at work. By modifying the initial variables, Terna is able to predict “what would have happened if …”. Using his model, the professor studied a series of scenarios evaluating how the contagion curve changes as the initial hypotheses change.
Well, after a thousand epidemic cycles, the model has returned an answer: the figures between a total closure and the hypothesis of a lockdown targeting only fragile workers are very close. Infections would increase, it is true, but not by much and the curve for deaths and ICU admissions would be practically identical. These are the two objectives that we try to achieve with the closures: to reduce deaths and prevent hospitals from going crazy, also causing the death of people who have never had Covid but who must have to do with a health system in pandemic emergency .
Mathematically, the Einaudi Center idea seems to work. This also explains why, seeing the latest anti-Covid tightening of these days, the three professionals lift their noses. It is useless to close the premises at a certain time or to alternate high school classes if you do not remove from the job market the favorite snack of the virus: the fragile ones. The risk is being caught in the dilemma of saving lives or saving the economy, with no real way out. The third way, however, as we have seen, is not so insurmountable. It would be enough to change a small law: currently family doctors cannot send home a worker at risk of illness, they can only do so if the patient has a full-blown illness. The result is that employers are forced to keep their employees fragile, trying in vain to protect them from a treacherous virus. Workers are forced to go to work, knowing that they are susceptible and do not feel protected at all. Protecting them temporarily might help both of them. It would save lives and save the economy. It seems like the panacea for all ills, but looking for numbers is just that: avoiding past mistakes and finding smarter solutions.
