[extropy-chat] Game theory of common cold

[Anders Sandberg]

söndagen den 18 januari 2004 15.53 wrote Mike Lorrey:
> --- Anders Sandberg <asa at nada.kth.se> wrote:
> > One conclusion is that discounts on school fees for parents who keep
> > sick children home might have a huge effect on health across society.
>
> How about just keep all kids home and homeschool. What would be the
> public health benefits of universal home schooling? How many adult work
> days would be saved (i.e. increasing economic productivity) by
> universal home schooling?

How does homschooling really work? We do not have it here in Sweden, so I have 
no intuition of its effect on my model. In particular, does parents stay at 
home teaching (full time or partial time)? How large are the economic 
savings? 

My guess is that keeping children away from schools would lower the infection 
risk and hence have a significant effect on health. But the utility of 
parents might be lowered since the cost of doing homeschooling could be 
greater than the benefit from keeping healthier - and others could play free 
riders by gaining the benefit of lowered infections without doing anything. 
Of course, this ignores that homeschooling very well could have positive 
utility too. 

As for savings, I found this abstract that suggests that even small decreases 
of colds would be a huge economic effect. However, the costs get distributed 
quite widely:

J Occup Environ Med. 2002 Sep; 44(9): 822-9. Related Articles, Links 

Productivity losses related to the common cold.

Bramley TJ, Lerner D, Sames M.

Health-related productivity assessments typically focus on chronic conditions; 
however, acute conditions, particularly colds, have the potential to cause 
substantial health-related productivity losses because of their high 
prevalence in working-age groups. This article presents the findings of a 
study conducted to estimate productivity loss due to cold by using a 
telephone-administered survey that measured three sources of loss: 
absenteeism, on-the-job productivity, and caregiver absenteeism. Each cold 
experienced by a working adult caused an average of 8.7 lost work hours (2.8 
absenteeism hours; 5.9 hours of on-the-job loss), and 1.2 work hours were 
lost because of attending to children under the age of 13 who were suffering 
from colds. We conclude that the economic cost of lost productivity due to 
the common cold approaches $25 billion, of which $16.6 billion is attributed 
to on-the-job productivity loss, $8 billion is attributed to absenteeism, and 
$230 million is attributed to caregiver absenteeism.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the effect was larger than alcohol losses:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8528030&dopt=Abstract

-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.