What the IMF calls the ‘great lockdown’ has thrown Europe and the global economy into a deep
recession. When putting their countries into lockdown, governments essentially pushed the
panic button, mostly in the face of rising fatalities. Was this the right choice? The answer to this
question is usually framed in terms of the lives saved versus jobs lost. However, a closer look at
the actual expenses for medical care that the pandemic has engendered so far and a bottomup
calculation for hospitalisation costs suggests that the economic costs of the great lockdown,
while very large, might still be lower than the medical costs that an unchecked spread of the
virus would have caused. There might thus be no need to assign an economic value to the lives
saved to come to the conclusion that a
