A quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a commonly used unit of currency to assess the value of medical interventions. A person who lives a year in perfect health equates to 1 QALYs, a person with bad hayfever for a year might equate to 0.999 QALYs, while a person with moderate-to-severe depression might equate to 0.5 QALYs. Being dead for a year equates to 0 QALYs.
QALYs are mostly used to compare the value of different interventions. For example, $50 of antibiotics for a serious infection that keeps someone alive and in good health when they otherwise would have died generates many QALYs, while an expensive anticancer drug that expands low-quality lifespan by only a few months might be worth only a fraction of a QALY. In this case, if we had a limited budget, we would spend it on the antibiotics over the chemotherapeutics to get more QALYs for our bucks.
What I've been unable to find anywhere in the literature is how many QALYs a typical human life equates to? If I save a newborn from dying, is that worth 70 QALYs (~global life expectancy), 50 QALYs (not all of life is lived in good health), or some other value? I presume there must be a value used by governments or academics used somewhere, but I can't find it. Does anyone know, or could explain where I might find it? Thanks!
P.S. I am aware that there are many other metrics used as well, such as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) by the WHO, value of a statistical life (VSL), or 'deaths averted' by Givewell and others.
You were rather conservative in choosing 82. It'd be fair to equate averting 82 DALYs to saving the life of a typical newborn and successfully immunizing said newborn from having any medical conditions that reduce their QALYs during their 82-year lifespan.
And of course the "typical" life saved is on average older than a newborn, so has fewer than 82 years of life remaining even before adjusting for DALY effects.