country: _α_ would have to be at least as high as that ratio for an observer to judge that the mortality cost exceeds the poverty cost.

Drawing on a rich combination of data sources on Covid-19 mortality, on demographic structures and age distributions, and on income distributions for 150 countries in the world, we estimate that the pandemic has generated 4.3 million lost years and as many as 68.2 million additional poverty years globally (using the extremely frugal international poverty line of 1 _._ 90 per day) by early June 2020. If median poverty lines are used for LICs, LMICs, UMICs and HICs, we estimate that 235 million poverty-years are being generated this year.

Across countries, the poverty-years to lost-years ratio ranges from just above 1 to more than 10,000. It is 3.6 in Belgium and 195 in Pakistan, for example. We document a very strong association between this ratio and GDP per capita, with poverty costs being systematically larger in poorer than in richer countries, both in absolute terms and relative to mortality costs. These results are for our baseline scenario, which conservatively assumes a distribution-neutral allocation of the income losses associated with the declines in GDP. Poverty costs are even greater in an alternative scenario where we allow for some increase in inequality, based on the pattern estimated for Argentina by Bonavida Foschiatti and Gasparini (2020). For most developing countries, it is dicult then to avoid the conclusion that one would have to place a very low weight on the welfare cost of falling into poverty to conclude that mortality costs exceed poverty costs.

It is important to note that this does not mean that public interventions aimed at containing the spread of the virus have been a cure worse than the disease. Indeed, we show that, for most countries, the absence of any non-pharmaceutical interventions would have led to mortality costs that far exceed the total welfare losses accrued as of early June. In a counterfactual scenario in which infection rates are allowed to rise until stopped by herd-immunity, the ratio of poverty-years to lost-years is typically below one (the lower bound for _α_ ) for most countries. Indeed, for most high-income countries the number of lost-years under no-intervention is (at least) twice as large as the sum of the lost-years and poverty-years generated as of early June, under all our scenarios. Thus, we must conclude that for these countries no-intervention was a dominated response. Interventions were successful in slowing the spread of the disease and, even if they led to increases in poverty, welfare losses were substantially lower.

As with our estimates for early June, the mortality costs of the pandemic dier markedly between developed and developing countries in the counterfactual, no-intervention scenario. For given infection rates, developed countries face mortality costs several times higher than those of developing countries, because their populations are considerably older, and because they have longer residual life-expectancies at given ages. For poverty, on the other hand, developing countries have a larger fraction of their population living on incomes close to the poverty lines we use.

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