The fight against a pandemic is obviously not an economic operation, but if we take into account, the vaccination campaign brought in much more than what it cost Canada.
The battle that governments have waged against the spread of the coronavirus?page=2″ target=”_blank”> COVID-19 has not been without some scrambles and waste, noted last week Karen Hogan. of Canada notably recommended that the federal government look into more than 27 billion in pandemic benefit payments that may have been allocated a little too quickly during the crisis, including 4.6 billion in Canadian emergency benefits (CERB) which would have been paid in duplicate.
Earlier this fall, The duty also reported that more than 22 of the 140 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine received in Canada expired and ended up in the trash before arms were found to inject them into.
The assessment of this extraordinary global health crisis will be a long process. The CD Howe Institute made its contribution on Thursday, unveiling a thirty-page study on the costs and economic “returns” of the pandemic vaccination campaign in Canada.
Apparently the first of its kind in the country, the study first recalls that in October, Canada had the highest proportion of the population having received at least two doses (80%) of a G10, also made up of the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, France and five other European countries. Canada also came in second, just behind Japan, for the lowest number of COVID-related cases and deaths per capita.
A (very) profitable operation
It is that, according to estimates, vaccination would have the power to reduce the number of cases by 21%, the number of hospitalizations by 37% and the number of deaths among Canadians aged 50 and over by 63%. It would also have had other indirect positive effects on health, such as a 28% reduction in the deleterious mental health effects of stress and anxiety caused by the disease and the confinement measures.
This vaccination was expensive, of course, reports the CD Howe. These include the purchase of doses ($23.75 per unit on average, for a total of $2.4 billion as of July 21), the salaries of the doctors, nurses and pharmacists who injected them (1, 3 billion), the price of syringes (43 to 57 million) as well as the cost of computer systems (16 million).
In the other column, we find all the costs and expenses that vaccination has avoided by reducing the ravages of COVID-19. We obviously think of the hours of work and the wages lost by those who would otherwise have fallen ill (1.2 to 3.7 billion). To this must be added the reduction in the number of long-term COVID cases (460 million) and what all this would have cost in health and hospitalization costs (1.6 billion).
At this stage, when we subtract the expenses incurred (3.7 billion) from the savings made (between 3.3 and 5.8 billion), we arrive at an estimate ranging from a “slight” net loss of 400 million to a gain of 2.1 billion.
But that’s before taking into account the lives that would likely have been lost without vaccines. It’s that there would otherwise have been nearly 35,000 additional deaths in Canada, and that experts have a way of assigning a “statistical economic value” to human life based on, among other things, the productivity that one can expect from a person according to his age. These 35,000 lives saved should still bring almost $28 billion to the Canadian economy.
These estimates remain crude and do not capture the many indirect effects of vaccination, observes the CD Howe Institute. Another way to count is to run a macroeconomic simulation to estimate the cost that would have been inflicted by waiting an additional six months before the start of the vaccination roll-out and an equivalent extension of containment measures, physical distancing rules and sometimes even curfews. This would have shrunk the Canadian economy by 12.5% in 2021, it was calculated, or about $156 billion.
On the rest of the planet
We would have liked vaccines against COVID-19 to have the same economic benefits in all countries, including the less wealthy. However, their vaccination rate still vegetates below 30%, against an average approaching 73% for developed countries, according to the United Nations.
Yet the global economic losses due to this delay have already been estimated at US$9 trillion by the International Chamber of Commerce, half of which would be borne by the rich countries themselves. And vaccinating the entire planet would cost less than 1% of that amount. But that, unfortunately, is another story.