1.10 overall, 1.11 excluding New York. Tomorrow afternoon I will have comments.

1. The NYT has a hopeful story.

On April 14, Mr. Bello was disconnected from the ventilator and began breathing on his own for the first time in 32 days.

This time, when she received a FaceTime call from the hospital, his wife gathered the children around. On the screen, he whispered the first words he’d been able to say to his family in a month: “I love you.”

As he was wheeled out of the I.C.U. to a regular floor, the medical staff, previously despondent about his case, lined the hospital hallway, erupting in applause. He waved.

I know of another lawyer who was taken off a ventilator several days ago, to the joy of the hospital staff, who said he was the first Covid-19 patient that they had been able to take off a ventilator while alive.

His Zoom funeral was yesterday.

2. Scott Gottlieb writes,

it could be years before a vaccine is produced at a scale sufficient to help the entire world. The first country to the finish line will be first to restore its economy and global influence. America risks being second.

China is making rapid progress, with three vaccines entering advanced development. Chinese officials say they could have a vaccine available for widespread use next year.

There certainly are worse priorities than trying to develop a vaccine. But the tone of the piece is that all it takes to succeed is sufficient national willpower.

3. T.J. Rodgers writes,

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%

I don’t trust the method, but I suspect that with better methods one would get similar results. I don’t think that government restrictions save lives. But of course, Justin Wolfers would not agree.

4. Joshua R. Goldstein and Ronald D. Lee write,

We estimate 75% of all US Covid-19 deaths to be age 70 or above, somewhat above the 64% for normal mortality. In fact, the age-distribution of deaths attributed to Covid-19 so far is quite similar to that of all-cause mortality, which tends to increase by about ten percent every year of age after age 30.

The goal of the paper is to provide a way to think about the mortality risk that the virus provides. One measure is the amount by which the presence of the virus increases your effective age. They scale this by the severity of the overall outbreak, meaning whether it kills 125,000 people in total or 2 million people in total.

An impact of 1 million deaths in three months in the United States would have the effect of temporarily exposing a 60 year-old to the normal mortality of a 73 year old.

In other words, a fairly large outbreak makes age 60 the new 73 in terms of mortality risk. Pointer from John Alcorn.

5. Today’s email included a message from Democracy Journal promoting a new book by Gene Sperling based on his essay Economic Dignity.

An economic dignity compact must ensure that those who do their part are able to care and provide opportunity for family. . .

Each American must have true first and second chances to pursue his or her potential. As Martha Nussbaum writes, “The notion of dignity is closely related to the idea of active striving.”

. . .A definition of economic dignity must include the capacity to contribute economically with respect and without domination and humiliation.

As I see it, the virus is causing a lot of people to lose their economic dignity. The lockdowns are making that worse. I think that the best hope for recovering economic dignity is a very strong dose of capitalism–letting price signals and the profit-and-loss system guide people into meaningful economic roles.

We want to do work that other people appreciate. That gives us dignity. Sitting at home waiting for permission from the government does not.

6. A paper by Sumedha Gupta and others.

Using multiple proxy outcome measures, we find large declines in mobility in all states since the start of the epidemic. Even states that did not implement major policy changes have experienced large mobility declines, and other states experienced large changes before the policy actions.

The best part is the charts at the end. For example, a chart showing trends in “social mixing” shows a sharp decline from about March 5 through about March 23, and a slower decline thereafter.

The authors speculate that lifting restrictions could have a stronger effect in causing people to go out by giving the impression that everything is all right. That may be a valid concern. If I were the government official announcing that restrictions are lifted, I would say very emphatically “This is not an all clear. This is simply a policy that leaves the choice up to individuals and businesses how they wish to handle risk.” I also think that a mandatory masks-when-in-public policy would send the right signal.

7. Here is a new paper by Jason Abaluck and others on the case for wearing masks. I have not read it. Sounds like academics getting a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. (BGO is not my phrase, just so you know)

Sam Long and Alexander Synkov write,

Altogether the Fed will deploy more than $1.45 trillion in support of investors in leveraged assets—more than double the size of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, and over $7,000 for each working-age American. That includes $750 billion to purchase recently downgraded junk bonds and bond exchange-traded funds—an unprecedented intervention in the private credit markets.

I have said all along that the checks being written to households and small businesses were just a fig leaf to cover a massive bailout of large corporations and the financial industry.

If we saw mobs breaking into stores, pulling items from the shelves, and walking out, we would recognize this as looting. But if we define looting as taking property without giving anything of value in return, then it is now widespread.

Tenants are looting landlords by not paying rent and not getting evicted.

Borrowers are looting banks by not paying mortgages or credit card debt.

Shareholders of airlines are looting the rest of us by getting bailout money.

The financial industry is looting us by getting bailout money from the Fed.

The government does not produce food, electricity, medical care, or any of the stuff that you can order from Amazon. The government produces pieces of paper, which it uses for looting. Households and businesses who are prudent and try to save for the future will be looted the most, through taxes and inflation. I predict that sooner or later the people who do work to produce food, electricity, and so on also will be looted, as their pieces of paper that will depreciate in value before they can spend them.

We are becoming a culture that accepts looting. It’s not people’s fault that they cannot pay their bills, so let them loot. It’s not the airlines’ fault that hardly anyone is flying, so let them loot. We can’t afford to let the financial industry go under, so let it loot. The government can pay its bills by printing money, so let it loot.

The widespread looting is not criminal, in that it is taking place within the framework of our political and administrative system. So far, it is not accompanied by violence. For that, we can be thankful.

1. 3DDRR edged down to 1.12, and 1.14 outside of New York. I will comment on Tuesday.

2. Javier O writes

those who carried the disease into Europe must have gone from Wuhan to Europe for reasons of leisure or work. And if for work related reasons, their behaviour (hand shaking, hugging long time colleagues, being together for long hours in closed environments) would be very different from what you would expect from tourists.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I wonder what the data for airline passenger traffic shows for each week from the end of February to the end of March. My guess is that if we see a sharp decline, that would be followed by a slowdown in the spread rate. Although this virus does have a formidable ability to spread once it is in a community.

3. That same Tyler Cowen post also points to Christopher Phelan.

The number of times humankind has created an effective vaccine against any coronavirus currently stands at zero. While some antiviral treatments have shown promise, hopes that a “magic bullet” treatment is soon forthcoming are exactly that — hopes.

I think that one of the reasons that Americans spend so much on health care is that we place a high value on hope. We always hope that another test will identify the cause of the pain, another type of treatment will solve the problem, and so on. We don’t admire a doctor who says, “You just have to accept your condition.”

The idea of letting the virus runs its course cuts against that culture of hope. Such a policy would be an admission of defeat. But some of us see the lockdown as a form of futile care. When I introduced Anti-fragile Arnold, I pointed out that those of us who seek to avoid getting the virus as long as we can should not be dictating the behavior of everyone else.

Check out the tenth podcast from Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Skip the first 4+minutes, which only have music.

I noted the following:

1. A different flaw in the Santa Clara study.
2. Scans can show severe lung damage in people who report no symptoms
3. Their subjective probability that the virus was engineered in a lab has increased (they do not quantify by how much, but I think it is a lot).
4. They cite instances in which odd corners of the Internet are outperforming mainstream science and mainstream journalism. This comes through most in the last few minutes of he podcast.

The epistemology of this virus is fascinating. Some experts believe that about 3 million Americans have been infected, and other experts believe it is more like 30 million. Some experts focus on what it does to lungs, while others believe that it attacks the body in other ways. There is controversy, particularly since yesterday, concerning whether having the virus confers immunity. There is disagreement over how accurate tests must be in order to be useful (although perhaps I am the only one arguing that the current level of accuracy is insufficient).

I approach epistemology as a logic puzzle. If I believe A, B, and C, does that mean I have to believe D? Or if I become convinced that D is false, what do I have to do with my beliefs in A, B, and C?

Sometimes, as in (3) above, I use subjective probability as a shorthand. But I think of myself as having a complex, interconnected set of beliefs, so that I am reluctant to express any one belief as a subjective probability. This notion of complex, interconnected beliefs sounds to me as though it relates to Quine, but I don’t feel sufficiently well acquainted with Quine’s ideas to implicate him.

In my epistemology, I have contempt for computer models. I will spell this out more below. Continue reading →

1.Kieran F. Docherty and others write,

A substantial proportion of excess deaths observed during the current COVID-19 pandemic are not attributed to COVID-19 and may represent an excess of deaths due to other causes.

Pointer from John Alcorn. This raises the possibility that the panic over the virus is causing about as many deaths as the virus. That would be because we are conserving hospital resources in order to maintain capacity to treat Covid patients. But don’t absolutely bet on this research being correct. For one thing, if they use our CDC numbers, the CDC has a much lower estimate of virus deaths than other data sources. But the researchers are showing the same sorts of findings for other countries.

2. 3DDRR today was 1.14, and excluding New York it was 1.17, but I am waiting until Tuesday to comment.