On the $250/day figure, if you want to make the cost-effectiveness of reducing the probability you spread the disease more comparable to GiveWell-recommended charities by valuing lives equally, the cost to save a life through AMF is about $2,000*, so you would use that instead of $1 million, reducing the impact about 500 times to about $0.50/day or about $15/month. This means that if it costs you > $15/month (directly or through opportunity costs) to avoid the risk, you can do more good by donating that to AMF instead.
*and it has other benefits and other GiveWell-recommended charities are estimated to be even better; this doesn’t take into account how many years of life are gained or quality of life. GiveWell suggests not to take these estimates literally.
Even if you want to eliminate the economic value of life and only consider their moral value, you still need to consider the economic value of avoiding hospitalization, which is about $100/day. It’s highly unlikely that buying malaria nets is higher value than actions you can take that will meaningfully contribute to overwhelming an expensive hospital system.
I don’t think it’s unlikely at all; I don’t think that $100/day would be used for something nearly as cost-effective as bednets if it weren’t being spent on healthcare. Hospitals and governments will spend what it takes to handle the coronavirus in patients, up to a pretty high limit per patient.
I think a more important concern might be limited medical resources and triaging, but that should go into the cost-effectiveness analysis model, and it’s not something I should speculate about without expertise.
Thanks for writing this and sharing!
On the $250/day figure, if you want to make the cost-effectiveness of reducing the probability you spread the disease more comparable to GiveWell-recommended charities by valuing lives equally, the cost to save a life through AMF is about $2,000*, so you would use that instead of $1 million, reducing the impact about 500 times to about $0.50/day or about $15/month. This means that if it costs you > $15/month (directly or through opportunity costs) to avoid the risk, you can do more good by donating that to AMF instead.
*and it has other benefits and other GiveWell-recommended charities are estimated to be even better; this doesn’t take into account how many years of life are gained or quality of life. GiveWell suggests not to take these estimates literally.
Even if you want to eliminate the economic value of life and only consider their moral value, you still need to consider the economic value of avoiding hospitalization, which is about $100/day. It’s highly unlikely that buying malaria nets is higher value than actions you can take that will meaningfully contribute to overwhelming an expensive hospital system.
I don’t think it’s unlikely at all; I don’t think that $100/day would be used for something nearly as cost-effective as bednets if it weren’t being spent on healthcare. Hospitals and governments will spend what it takes to handle the coronavirus in patients, up to a pretty high limit per patient.
I think a more important concern might be limited medical resources and triaging, but that should go into the cost-effectiveness analysis model, and it’s not something I should speculate about without expertise.