Case 2 Coronavirus lockdown

You are an intern at the health department of your city. An outbreak of coronavirus has been detected in a hotel in your city. 10 guests are infected. You must decide whether to quarantine the hotel or not. There are 1000 guests in the hotel. From previous experience, we know that at least half of them will be infected if the quarantine goes in to effect. If there is no quarantine the virus will spread more rapidly to the general population in the city. What would you do? Your city has 8 million population. The death rate of this virus is 2%, the cost of lock down of hotel is AED 1M per day. The length of the quarantine is 2 months. Assume all missing information.

The solution of Case 2

Note that in this case we use the accounting format where we used red and parenthesis to indicate cost as a negative value and benefit as positive in black ink and no parenthesis.

Case 2

Amounts in millions	Do nothing	Quarantine
Cost dead guests hotel (100 guest @ 2% death rate @ 400k per life)		(0.08)
Cost of lock down hotel (60 days @1M)		(60)
Costs deaths in city assume 100% infected (population @2% death rate @400k per life)	(64,000)	(64,000)
Value of delay in deaths
(Cost of city deaths x (2 months extra life / life expectancy))		183
Total	(64,000)	(63,877)