no way we can afford to vaccinate the entire country first. Way too paternalistic (and maybe that’s not 100% what you meant) and isn’t achievable. Give everyone a shot for a shot then we need to go.
we have 1000 deaths a year from road accidents and don’t shut down all traffic.
we have 25000 deaths a year from smoking and don’t make that illegal.
somewhere between these two numbers is reasonable and we need to wrap our heads around that. There are NOT infinite resources that support indefinite lockdowns. The purpose now is to avoid what is happening in Indonesia. No government will ever say it but safety standards and rules, rare drug suppprr to save lives etc do put a dollar value on human life. The number isn’t infinity. You can back calculate it but is typically somewhere 3-5 million dollar type range in advanced countries. In poorer countries it is orders of magnitude less.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
We are spending billions per week so math says 200 lives per billion spent. This makes sense in context of an Indonesia situation. Once vaccinated the numbers won’t stack up. Emotionally this may be challenging but you have to wrap your head around there not being Iinfinite resources and there is a need to prioritise where resources go. This is going to be a challenge as the community is now conditioned to managing cases instead of hospital numbers / ICU utilisation etc.
I have dealt with risk assessment and allocating scarce resources - you do make these assessments when prioritising once the law has been meant.
there is a cost in many other areas of government that will be felt to pay for the pandemic. It will be either higher taxes or lower services or both - and for a long time. (And then we will hear all the complaints about that. )
