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The COVID-19 pandemic poses novel health issues. However, the benefits and costs of the pandemic and policies to address it have a familiar economic structure. Chief among the health-related benefits are the monetized values of the U.S. mortality costs of $3.9 trillion in 2020. The combined U.S. mortality and morbidity costs are $5.5–5.9 trillion. Global mortality costs in 2020 total $10.1 trillion. The skewed age distribution of COVID-19 illnesses has stimulated increased advocacy of downward adjustments in the value of a statistical life (VSL) for older people. This article examines the role of age for policy analysis generally and for the rationing of scarce medical treatments, such as ventilators. Mortality risk reduction benefits should be based on the reduced probability of death multiplied by the pertinent VSL. Effective communication of risks to foster precautions hinges on the credibility of the information source, which public officials have jeopardized. Efficient control of risks imposes limits on personal freedoms to foster health improvements.

Presidential Address at the 2018 SAGES Annual Meeting Seattle, Washington, April 13, 2018. Working together, there is no limit to what SAGES teams can achieve with innovation, passion, persistence, and a little luck. The speech highlights several SAGES initiatives, and he recognizes their champions.

This essay, a version of which was presented as the 2022 Society for Textual Scholarship Presidential Address, considers the state of textual scholarship in light of converging disasters of our moment — human-induced climate change, resurgent xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, territorial warfare, violent racism, and a humanistic academy under attack from both without and within. After surveying important recent textual scholarly work in queer studies, African American literature, Native American studies, and archival studies, the essay gestures to emerging domains of theoretical and practical work on which textual scholars might draw to encourage the development of survival-oriented philology in the present.