Can you clarify why you think it’s “incorrect” to conceive of disease burden as ongoing, or applying per unit of time, and more accurate to treat it as a per-life constant?
One objection to the “per-life constant” approach is that it could easily incorrectly imply that some short-lived but happy disabled lives are net-negative for the person living it. (Suppose the constant burden for deafness comes out to one year per lifetime, and then imagine a deaf child who lives happily for less than one year. So long as their short life was happy, it would seem inaccurate to call it net-negative! By contrast, the standard per-unit-of-time approach allows that happy deaf lives are always worth living, just not quite as good as they would have been without the mild disability.)
Can you clarify why you think it’s “incorrect” to conceive of disease burden as ongoing, or applying per unit of time, and more accurate to treat it as a per-life constant?
One objection to the “per-life constant” approach is that it could easily incorrectly imply that some short-lived but happy disabled lives are net-negative for the person living it. (Suppose the constant burden for deafness comes out to one year per lifetime, and then imagine a deaf child who lives happily for less than one year. So long as their short life was happy, it would seem inaccurate to call it net-negative! By contrast, the standard per-unit-of-time approach allows that happy deaf lives are always worth living, just not quite as good as they would have been without the mild disability.)