Karol Sikora drew our attention to this exchange between the Prime Minister and Mr. Hugo Keith KC over whether the lockdown caused more harm than good.

Sunak was drawing attention to a particular type of economic analysis called cost-benefit analysis (CBA) performed by academics from Imperial and Manchester.

But also I think – analysis has been done subsequent to this that I wasn’t aware of at the time from professors of medicine and economics at Imperial and Manchester that applied a QALY analysis to the first lockdown and its duration. And their QALY analysis, which you’ll be familiar with, is a tool of health, a public health analysis, suggested that the lockdown in its severity and duration is likely to have generated costs that are greater than the likely benefit. So I think –

In a variant of the CBA analysis called cost-utility analysis (CUA), the benefit part is calculated by constructing a QALY or quality-adjusted life year, which weighs the length of life gained by its quality. One of the strengths of QALYs is that they wrap up in one measure with what economists call “intangibles” such as pain, grief and suffering, which we all know so well from the lockdowns.