The amount of money people are willing to spend on COVID-19 mitigation is truly gobsmacking.
Economist Sergio Rebelo estimate that the lockdown will shrink the US economy by approximately 22%—a cost of $4.2 trillion. (6) Economists Makridis and Hartley estimate a 5 percent decline in real GDP growth for every one month of partial economic shutdown. Thus, the economic cost of two months of mitigation measures is $2.14 trillion (10 percent). (8) Other countries are paying costs of similar magnitude. (7)
Yet is COVID-19 mitigation going to give us the highest return on lives saved/dollar spent?
What if that money had been spent on anti-aging research instead?
To put the amount of money spent on COVID-19 mitigation in context, spending on COVID-19 dwarfs national spending on pet care ($71 billion) which in turn is more than double the _entire_ NIH budget ($31 billion), of which only 3.7% goes to the National Institute of Aging ($1.2 billion). (1), (2)
Consider that COVID-19 has cost 515,000 global deaths _total_ to date, whereas aging takes ~100,000 lives _per day_.
More people die from aging in five days, than have died from COVID-19 _total_ gobally to date.
Now, of course, a lot people might say: we can do something to stop COVID-19; we can't do anything to stop aging.
And it _used_ to be the case that little could be done about aging. At that time, fatalism was a reasonable attitude. But that's no longer the case. To cite just one promising anti-aging study:
"In a study published today in the journal Nature, medical researchers at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine—led by cell biologists Darren Baker and Jan van Deursen—have made this decade's biggest breakthrough in understanding the complex world of physical aging. The researchers found that systematically removing a category of living, stagnant cells (ones which can no longer reproduce) extends the lives of otherwise normal mice by 25 percent. " (4)
Even if one doesn't care about aging per se, people with aging bodies are most at risk for dying from COVID-19. The best way to make humanity more resilient against COVID-19 and other age-related diseases is to strike at its source.
Curing death would just be a side effect.
The potential returns from aging research are enormous:
"Using a model of future health and spending in the USA, the effect of delayed aging resulting in 2.2 years additional life expectancy would yield US$7 trillion in savings over 50 years; whereas addressing single pathologies such as cancer and heart disease would yield less" (3)
But sadly, COVID-19 levels of money are not going to be spent on aging any time soon. I wish I knew what to do to make people feel the same urgency about aging that they do about COVID-19.
#aging
(1) https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2015/10/billionaire-philanthropists-funding-anti-aging-research
(2) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/americans-are-spending-more-on-pets-than-ever-before-72-billion-300816835.html
(3) https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/fulltext/S0167-7799(17)30171-3
(4) https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a19277/scientists-can-now-radically-expand-the-lifespan-of-mice-are-humans-next/
(5) https://www.sens.org/covid-19-and-aging/
(6) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/modelers-weigh-value-lives-and-lockdown-costs-put-price-covid-19
(7) https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/14/the-past-three-months-have-proved-it-the-costs-of-lockdown-are-too-high
(8) https://www.mercatus.org/publications/covid-19-policy-brief-series/cost-covid-19-rough-estimate-2020-us-gdp-impact
Economist Sergio Rebelo estimate that the lockdown will shrink the US economy by approximately 22%—a cost of $4.2 trillion. (6) Economists Makridis and Hartley estimate a 5 percent decline in real GDP growth for every one month of partial economic shutdown. Thus, the economic cost of two months of mitigation measures is $2.14 trillion (10 percent). (8) Other countries are paying costs of similar magnitude. (7)
Yet is COVID-19 mitigation going to give us the highest return on lives saved/dollar spent?
What if that money had been spent on anti-aging research instead?
To put the amount of money spent on COVID-19 mitigation in context, spending on COVID-19 dwarfs national spending on pet care ($71 billion) which in turn is more than double the _entire_ NIH budget ($31 billion), of which only 3.7% goes to the National Institute of Aging ($1.2 billion). (1), (2)
Consider that COVID-19 has cost 515,000 global deaths _total_ to date, whereas aging takes ~100,000 lives _per day_.
More people die from aging in five days, than have died from COVID-19 _total_ gobally to date.
Now, of course, a lot people might say: we can do something to stop COVID-19; we can't do anything to stop aging.
And it _used_ to be the case that little could be done about aging. At that time, fatalism was a reasonable attitude. But that's no longer the case. To cite just one promising anti-aging study:
"In a study published today in the journal Nature, medical researchers at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine—led by cell biologists Darren Baker and Jan van Deursen—have made this decade's biggest breakthrough in understanding the complex world of physical aging. The researchers found that systematically removing a category of living, stagnant cells (ones which can no longer reproduce) extends the lives of otherwise normal mice by 25 percent. " (4)
Even if one doesn't care about aging per se, people with aging bodies are most at risk for dying from COVID-19. The best way to make humanity more resilient against COVID-19 and other age-related diseases is to strike at its source.
Curing death would just be a side effect.
The potential returns from aging research are enormous:
"Using a model of future health and spending in the USA, the effect of delayed aging resulting in 2.2 years additional life expectancy would yield US$7 trillion in savings over 50 years; whereas addressing single pathologies such as cancer and heart disease would yield less" (3)
But sadly, COVID-19 levels of money are not going to be spent on aging any time soon. I wish I knew what to do to make people feel the same urgency about aging that they do about COVID-19.
#aging
(1) https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2015/10/billionaire-philanthropists-funding-anti-aging-research
(2) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/americans-are-spending-more-on-pets-than-ever-before-72-billion-300816835.html
(3) https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/fulltext/S0167-7799(17)30171-3
(4) https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a19277/scientists-can-now-radically-expand-the-lifespan-of-mice-are-humans-next/
(5) https://www.sens.org/covid-19-and-aging/
(6) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/modelers-weigh-value-lives-and-lockdown-costs-put-price-covid-19
(7) https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/14/the-past-three-months-have-proved-it-the-costs-of-lockdown-are-too-high
(8) https://www.mercatus.org/publications/covid-19-policy-brief-series/cost-covid-19-rough-estimate-2020-us-gdp-impact