An Ethical Formula for Pandemic Lockdowns

Originally devised in 2020.

An unused day is like a small death; a period of potential taken away forever. The average person accomplishes significantly less in a lockdown than in freedom. This means that one death can be counted every time this collectively lost potential adds up to a region’s life expectancy. Here is a procedure for calculating the number of lockdown deaths in a given region:

• Let p represent population;
• let l represent average life expectancy in years;
• let d represent duration of a lockdown in days; and
• let 0 ≤ q ≤ 1 represent quality of life.
• q can be derived from:
  • (100 - lockdown stringency) ÷ 100 provided that lockdown stringency is in %; or
  • surveying affected people about quality of life during a lockdown.

Number of lockdown deaths = (1 - q) ⋅ p ⋅ d ÷ 365 ÷ l.

As the number of lockdown deaths decreases, the number of actual deaths caused by a pandemic would increase, and vice versa. This equation can be used to model the ideal ratio of lockdown to freedom—the minimum total death.