Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today we're going to be asking

some awkward, often neglected questions. Like will the economic recession itself prove more fatal

than coronavirus? Intuitively, you might guess that economic crashes would result in increased

death rates, but going as far back as the Great Depression,

scholars have been surprised to find the death rates actually drop.

Also, how do, how should governments put a value on human life?

Should they be paying more attention to this?

We haven't actually got our economy coordinated. If lives were

taken off making airplanes safer and instead used on saving lives in the health service,

they would save many more lives. Counting the cost of COVID, that's Business Daily from the BBC.

Well, this crisis certainly has raised an awful lot of pretty deep questions, such as the

level of the threat we all face from COVID-19. How far are we willing to throw away our economy

to fight it? And could the lockdown do more harm than the disease? We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.

We're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem.

Exactly.

So today, with some expert help, I'm going to be trying to assess some of those questions.

First off, how much value, how much of our wealth should we be spending to save those among us who may yet die from COVID-19.

Bryce Wilkinson, a senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative in Wellington, it's a think tank.

Well, he's been thinking quite a bit about this.

That's quite a difficult thing to do because you're comparing apples and oranges.

There's the loss of income which can be expressed in dollar terms, national income per capita.

But then there's the inconvenience and costs of sickness and death.

...