Covid-19: equal response and unequal interests
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Covid‑19: equal response and unequal interests Hartmut Kliemt1 Received: 21 July 2020 / Accepted: 25 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The greatest risks of Covid-19 are not arising from its direct effects on morbidity and mortality but from exaggerated aspirations to control such effects politically. A swift transformation from an epidemic to an endemic state of affairs may in case of a disease with comparatively low and unequally distributed mortality like covid-19 be an option, too. This needs to be laid out but it is not the task of science to plead for this or any other option. Keywords Life-years lost · Lives lost · Non-medical nature of tradeoffs When Covid-19 hit, citizens of constitutional democracies around the world accepted physical distancing as expressive of fundamental respect for the life and personal integrity of each and every citizen. Constrained by and supportive of constitutionalized “priority of liberty” the tribute paid to the individual in public opinion should be registered with satisfaction by all adherents of rule of law societies. Yet, since “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people” [(Hobbes 1990), 16] the presently dominant opinion that politics should do “whatever it takes” to rescue lives needs to be counter-balanced by an open discussion of the fundamental trade-offs between competing interests that alternative policies involve. After physical distancing makes the economic costs of preventing deaths increasingly visible it starts to dawn on citizens that despite the tremendous costs that have already been incurred, the virus persists and the pandemic will be looming large until basic herd immunity arises either naturally through infections or artificially through a vaccine. In states in which they are constitutionally entitled to do so, citizens will increasingly question the suitability of government measures of coercive physical distancing—and rightly so. My thanks are to Friedrich Breyer for imposing again his discipline of continuous criticism on me. * Hartmut Kliemt hartmut.kliemt@t‑online.de 1
Behavioral and Institutional Economics, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany
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1 Unequally at risk, equally coerced Practically all people are affected by coercive state measures of imposing physical distancing. Practically all who have not yet been infected with Covid-19 can contract the disease. In that sense each and everybody is equally affected by the virus. However, in particular the risks of dying from an infection are not equal. Young as well as healthy individuals can overwhelmingly expect to survive an infection typically with rather minor symptoms and mostly with a prospect of full recovery. Societies that have managed to “flatten the curve” could instead have let the virus run its course and could still do so in the expectation that the numbers of infected individuals would peak on relatively short notice. Foreseeably, around peak time
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