The U.S. COVID response could have averted hundreds of thousands of deaths: investigation

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States wasted money and lives on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and could have prevented nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and reduced federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars , although they supported those who needed it.

This is the conclusion of a group of research papers published at a Brookings Institution conference this week, which offer an early and comprehensive start on what will likely be an intense effort in the coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic. ‘a century.

The death toll from US COVID-19 could have been less than 300,000, compared to a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if last May the country had adopted widespread protocols for masks, social distancing and testing while waiting for a vaccine, according to Andrew Atkeson, a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He compared the parcel response state by state with the cruise control of a car. As the virus worsened, people became entangled, but when the situation improved the restrictions were lifted and people were less careful, with the result that “the balance level of daily deaths … remains in a relatively narrow band “until the vaccine arrived.

Atkeson projected a final mortality level of about 670,000 as vaccines spread and the crisis subsided. The result, if no vaccine had been developed, would have been much worse than 1.27 million, according to Atkeson.

The economic response, while huge, could also have been better adapted, argued Christine Romer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He joins former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and several others in the last two Democratic administrations to criticize authorized spending since last spring, including the US $ 1.9 trillion Biden team rescue plan. of dollars.

While he said the federal government’s more than $ 5 trillion pandemic-related spending is unlikely to trigger a fiscal crisis, he is concerned that higher-priority investments will be postponed due to allocations to initiatives such as the salary protection.

These forgivable small business loans were “an interesting and noble experiment,” but they were also “problematic on many levels,” including an apparent cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for every job saved, he said.

“Spending on programs like unemployment compensation and public health was exactly what was being asked for,” he wrote, but other aspects, particularly generous one-time payments to families, were “largely ineffective and wasteful”.

“If something like the $ 1 trillion spent on stimulus payments that did little to help those most affected by the pandemic ends up preventing them from spending $ 1 trillion on infrastructure or climate change in the coming years, the United States will have to made a very bad negotiation, “Romer wrote.

Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, argue that the full package was needed to ensure all workers and families remain financially intact until the labor market recovers.

In a separate paper, Minneapolis Federal Reserve researchers Krista Ruffini and Abigail Wozniak concluded that federal programs did much of what they intended by supporting income and spending, with the impact seen in how changed consumption in response to the approval and expiration of various government payments.

But they also found room for improvement.

Evidence of PPP effectiveness in job retention, for example, was “mixed,” they found, and increases in food assistance did not take into account things like higher grocery prices.

“Food insecurity remained high throughout 2020,” they noted.

They said the goal should be to determine what worked to make the response to any similar crisis more effective.

“The response from the 2020 social security system was very successful,” they said. “Given the scope and scale of the pandemic response, it is critical that we continue to evaluate these efforts to understand the full extent of their reach, which populations were helped, and who was left out.”