For various reasons the rate of infection in Kansas is back on the way up, and it’s bound to get worse as the weather cools and we all spend more time indoors together.
As businesspeople, we want to see a return on our investment. But what if the investment we make isn’t in our business or in the stock market, but in our health, and specifically in COVID-19 protection? An analysis from Goldman Sachs recently tried to answer this very question.
How do masks affect usage, case rate, and fatality?
The investigators estimated that the “Effective Lockdown Index, or “ELI,” a statistic of their own that takes into account a combination of official social mobility restrictions and actual social distancing data, took away about 17% from American gross domestic product (GDP) between January and April this year.
Then they looked at data from multiple sources to make a couple big conclusions:
First, mask mandates immediately increase the number of people who mask by about 25%. This seems reasonable and in line with our local experience when the Sedgwick County and City of Wichita emergency orders went into place. (It’s also worth remembering on a national level that Florida and Texas, two of the most-affected states, still don’t have statewide mask mandates).
Second, mask mandates are associated with large reductions in cases and deaths from COVID-19:
Again, this is largely in line with the change seen in Kansas counties with mask mandates versus counties without mask mandates. So using some further reasonable assumptions and fancy statistical methods, the Goldman Sachs folks determined that a national mandate would cause a 15 percent rise in the share of the population that wears masks, which would in turn reduce the daily growth of cases by about one percent.
Gauging the economic impact of wearing a mask
With those numbers in their pockets, the investigators went back to their “ELI” to determine what fraction of the economy would be affected by another March/April-style lockdown:
They determined that another lockdown similar to this past spring’s would cost just short of 5% of total economic activity. As we said last spring, pandemic viruses cause recessions. Then authors writing in The Economist simply divided that share of GDP by the number of people who would start wearing masks under a mandate and came up with a value for mask wearing. They calculated that one American wearing a mask for one day prevents a fall in GDP of $56.14, or about double the initial fine that you would get in Wichita for being a recalcitrant mask non-wearer. As the authors of the Economist piece said, “Not bad for something that you can buy for about 50 cents apiece.” Clearly they’re not taking into account my designer taste in facial covering, but I digress.
It’s tough to overstate how huge this potential cost savings is. For reference, doubling smoking cessation counseling services, as we covered in a previous blog post, returns about $215 per employee over ten years, the equivalent of about $0.06 per day. I’ll admit that’s not a fair comparison, since we’re comparing the benefit to the employer in the case of smoking cessation versus the benefit to the national economy in mask-wearing. But I think my point is made.
I’m lucky to live in a mask-mandated city inside a mask-mandated county. But for the rest of us, if we want our businesses to stay open, and if we cannot count on mandates or enforcement at the city, county, state, or federal levels, we need to mandate mask use from our employees ourselves.
As the Medical Director of the Kansas Business Group on Health I’m sometimes asked to weigh in on topics that might affect employers or employees. This was a reprint of a blog post from KBGH.