It was wrong to believe that 'saving the economy' was an alternative to 'saving people's lives’.

If anything it is the other way around and the two goals go together so that countries that kept the health impact of the pandemic lower suffered smaller economic consequences.
This isn’t a new insight, it’s just more up to date data.
It was obvious early on in the pandemic and has been said by many economists for months.

Here is my colleague @JoeHasell’s post from last summer on the same point: ourworldindata.org/covid-health-e…
Or here is me last July saying the same.

It was my expectation then, now we have the data.

If you are interested in an academic paper (rather than a tweet) into the question whether there is a trade off or not:

1 – blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/202…

2 – rs-delve.github.io/reports/2020/0…

3 – inet.econ.cam.ac.uk/research-paper…

4 – the contrary position to mine: thetimes.co.uk/article/to-say…

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More from @MaxCRoser

1 Jan
Israel hat 11.5% der Bevölkerung geimpft
Deutschland 0.2%

Es liegt nicht daran, dass kein Impfstoff vorhanden ist.

Laut @jensspahn haben wir 1,3 Millionen Dosen erhalten.
Aber laut RKI haben wir nur 165,575 verimpft.

Währenddessen sterben hunderte und wir sitzen im Lockdown.
@jensspahn Özlem Türeci, Uğur Şahin und ihre Kollegen sagten, dass sie im vergangenen Jahr über Monate Nächte durchgearbeitet haben.

Angela Merkel war zu Recht »mächtig stolz« auf deren Leistung und jetzt scheitern wir daran den Impfstoff zu verwenden.

spiegel.de/politik/deutsc…
@jensspahn Für diejenigen die sagen, dass ein kleines Land wie Israel (8,9 Millionen) nicht mit Deutschland vergleichbar ist:
Baden–Württemberg hat eine Bevölkerung von 11 Millionen.

Während Baden–Württemberg 17,000 Menschen geimpft hat, hat Israel 1,000,000 geimpft.
Read 4 tweets
31 Dec 20
Letzte Woche erklärte @jensspahn dass in diesem Jahr 1,3 Millionen Impfdosen ausgeliefert werden.

Bisher sind laut RKI lediglich 131,626 Menschen in Deutschland geimpft worden.

Allein die Maßnahmen im März kosteten 750 Milliarden und jetzt bekommen wir es nicht hin zu impfen?
@jensspahn Israel impft mehr Menschen am Tag als Deutschland bisher geimpft hat.

Hier sind unsere Daten: ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinat…
@jensspahn Wir sind weiter im Lockdown und jeden Tag sterben Menschen während hunderttausende Impfdosen bereitstehen.
Read 4 tweets
30 Dec 20
What is going on with the vaccination campaigns?

Pfizer/Biontech said that they’d provide 50 million doses worldwide within 2020.
There are other vaccines too.

Now, one day before the end of 2020, we find in our global dataset that only 5.4 million people received a vaccine.
• More than 10,000 people die every day.
• Doctors and nurses work beyond their capacity.
• It costs us trillions, businesses are gone, millions unemployed.

Then scientists made the impossible possible and made a vaccine in 12 months.

We should really try to do this fast.
It isn’t impossible to do this rapidly.

Israel’s population receives its protection rapidly.

7.4% of Israel’s population has received the first dose.

In the US it is 0.8%
In Germany 0.09%
Read 4 tweets
30 Dec 20
Out of a group of 500 people over the age of 80 one dies within a week.

→ This means it will happen often that a person who was just vaccinated dies within a week.
Not due to the vaccine, but due to the high death rate of the people who are vaccinated first.

data in next tweet
The annual death rate for those over 80 is 10.75% in England & Wales

This means the chance of dying in any week is 0.206%.

[= 10.75% per year / 52 weeks]

So that out of a group of 485 people over 80 we have to expect one person to die within a week.
[100/0.206=485.4]
We will carefully monitor whether the various new vaccines have serious side effects.

But it's important to keep the high death rate of elderly people in mind as some might be tempted to conclude that a death on the next day was due to the vaccine even when it was not.
Read 4 tweets
30 Dec 20
Fantastic news from the UK!

The coronavirus vaccine designed by scientists at the University of Oxford has been just been approved for use in the UK.

bbc.com/news/health-55…
What’s great about this vaccine:

• it is stable at refrigerator temperatures
• the world has produced many million doses already and can scale up more

nature.com/articles/d4158…
• And the Oxford vaccine is very, very cheap.

(Given how valuable they are all vaccines are very cheap, but $3-$4 is incredibly cheap really.)

[source vox.com/21590994/oxfor…]
Read 5 tweets
26 Dec 20
We live at a very unusual time. We are among the very first generations who can make progress against large problems.
If we want to make progress against the problems we face, then this fact – that we *can* make progress – needs to be absolutely central to our culture.

Some people are building this culture, but it is still a long way to go.
By and large our culture is still the culture of pre-progress times: our media is not drawing our attention to the large problems we face and our education system is not teaching us that progress is possible.
Read 11 tweets

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