‘The $16 Trillion Virus’: Economists Estimate Financial Toll of COVID-19 on US

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and fellow Harvard University economist David Cutler argued in an essay on Oct. 12 that the pandemic will end up costing the United States $16 trillion, around four times the toll exacted by the 2007–08 Great Recession.

“Approximately half of this amount is the lost income from the COVID-19-induced recession; the remainder is the economic effects of shorter and less healthy life,” the two economists wrote in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which they called the outbreak...