Might it be that the calculations massively understate the benefits of lockdown? That would be the case if the value of lives saved is dramatically too low; some would say that it is. Estimates used in the US for the statistical value of a life place it slightly above $10 million (29,30). For a newborn who might expect 80 good years of life the NICE £30,000 number would generate a life value of £2.4 million – just under a third of the value if a statistical life is worth $10 million. Goldstein and Lee (2020) (31) note that US health economists use values of around $125,000 per year of life (Institute for Clinical and Economic Review 2020). That is also a bit over three times the NICE figure.

However, the £30,000 figure per QALY is the figure used in evidence-based resource decisions within the UK health system. It is not an arbitrary number. It is not based on likely future earnings lost or the value of future consumption – calculations that are open to the moral objection that they reduce the value of human life to how much people would have spent on commodities.

Instead, the figure we use for the value of a QALY is a measure of what is considered the highest level of resources (i.e. what part of GDP) in the UK health system that should be used to generate extra quality-adjusted years of life – and it is saving of lives which is what the lockdown was for. In using this yardstick, we are treating decisions on how to face COVID-19 in the same way as decisions in the UK are made about resources to apply to the treatment of cancer, heart disease, dementia and diabetes. On that basis, it would seem as though the benefits of the lockdown were  lower - perhaps far lower- than its costs. Yet even if one used valuation of a QALY three times as great the figures in Tables 2 and 3 (with benefits raised by a factor of 3) that would still generate costs of the lockdown in excess of benefits in nearly all the cases considered.

That judgement is, however, made with the benefit of hindsight: we now know more about the scale of the economic costs of the lockdown than was known in March, and also know about how deaths and new infections have evolved across Europe. The more interesting policy issue is what it is best to do now: how quickly should the lockdown be eased given what we know now? That issue we consider in the next section.