All of scottleibrand's Comments + Replies

I think the relevance of Starlink here is not for serving individuals in LMICs, but for providing backhaul for towers in places too remote to easily backhaul via fiber or line of sight microwave links.

I don't expect the outbreak to continue indefinitely in the US, Europe, or East Asia. As noted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bending-curve-covid-19-how-avoid-being-wuhan-lombardy-scott-leibrand/ , we are likely to need to implement 50-75% social distancing in order to avoid overloading ICU capacity, and at that point we've also basically stopped growth in new cases, making it comparatively easy to keep doing more of the same until new cases start to noticeably shrink, as they did in China, Singapore, and now Korea. The real question to me is ... (read more)

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.

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MichaelStJules
4y
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.

I just went ahead and edited this post to include the full text.

This is my first time posting here, so not sure of all the protocols: if it'd be better to duplicate the content here rather than linking to the LinkedIn post, I'm happy to move it over.

Yeah I’d love to see it copied over here, looks like an interesting analysis