How to Quantify Infectious Disease Response Risk/Reward

I propose to the #CDC @CDCgov  or whoever would be in charge, that we not evaluate infectious disease responses in terms deaths prevented, but rather in terms of YEARS of life saved. 

This makes the risk/reward easier to quantify. 

If the disease is costing us an average of 10 years of life for .002% of the population, then maybe it's not worth asking 100% of the population to stay in their homes for 2 years. 

The net negative impact to humanity is actually greater for the preventative action. 

Additionally, if the risk/reward is properly quantified, we don't have to force anyone to do anything and we shouldn't do this. 

We can simply give them the numbers, and let them make up their minds as to the risk they want to take.

We could rate disease in terms of years of life lost, years of life that are potentially salvageable through actions, years of life impacted by actions taken and severity of actions required as a multiplier on those years. 

If severity of action is high enough, then the entire human life year is considered "lost" through the action. 

Then we can simply do the math on human life years saved vs human life years paid. If that equation doesn't add up to a benefit, DON'T ACT.

Though I'd add another layer to that as well. Youth lives should get higher weighting, because their experiences in years lost are more likely to be irreplaceable and are more likely to leave lasting damage and/or deficits on their lives.

More context here: https://splayed-rants.blogspot.com/2024/05/covid-maskers.html

One issue that remains is we don't' yet have good understanding of how many lives would be saved for a given action taken.

But that's not exactly a good reason to force action on the population...

We should seek to get some kind of projection, as to years of life saved by the action before asking the public to do anything. 

And we can then improve our models and projections over time.