Today, it edged up to 1.18 and outside New York it edged up to 1.22

As a reminder, this is the ratio of cumulative deaths as of today to that as of three days ago. The goal is to spot a dramatic drop in the spread rate as of a few weeks ago. My thinking is that testing protocols change too often to use reported cases as an indicator. But increasingly we read that reporting protocols for Covid deaths are variable. Some experts want to try to compute “excess deaths” by comparing each week to an average of the same week in past years. That is not a task that I want to take on.

Following the trend in the 3DDRR, I was much more optimistic two weeks ago than I am today. I want to see the ratio drop to something like 1.002, and it looks like it is going to take a long time to get there.

Arnold is anti-fragile. One house, one spouse. Defensive driver. He would rather not be infected with the virus now. He hopes that by the time he is infected there will be a safe and effective treatment.

Randy is a risk-taker. Likes to go 75 mph on his motorcycle. Thinks that people who eat to live have it backwards. He would rather meet friends at a crowded bar than worry about when he gets infected with the virus.

It is possible that Randy’s behavior imposes a cost on Arnold. That is, the more that Randy risks getting infected and infecting others, the more difficult it becomes for Arnold to avoid contact with people getting the virus. Instead of going to the grocery in the afternoon, Arnold feels like he has to order for delivery or else get up early in the morning to shop in the store while Randy and his friends are still hung over.

Is this additional cost enough to justify the government stepping in and closing the bar so that Randy cannot go there? I do not believe so. I think that government should stay out of it, and let Arnold and Randy make their own choices. Back when we were afraid that Randy could cause excess crowding in hospitals, there was a persuasive public-good argument to change his behavior. Now there isn’t.

Brian Doherty tries to steel-man “openers” (who want to end lockdowns) and “closers.”

Closers see and acknowledge the economic damage we are suffering, but see most of that damage already inherent in the unchecked spread of a disease that kills or seriously harms people to a greater extent than any we’ve dealt with in a century. They thus don’t see the economic problems solvable just by “opening up America.”

As an “opener,” I do not think that lifting restrictions will do a lot to help the economy. I have made that point repeatedly. I agree with the “closer” view that most of the damage comes from the virus itself and the understandable individual responses to it.

The “closer” side annoys me when their rhetoric is based on intentions rather than consequences. That is, they try to make it seem as though “openers” want people to get infected and “closers” don’t. But it is likely that the only margin on which lockdowns can make a difference is that they will make more people get infected later rather than sooner. The number of lives that can be saved by doing that is likely to be small, and it may even be negative. Particularly if almost all of the people whose infections get shifted into the future are healthy people who will get mild or asymptomatic cases, and meanwhile we fail to develop and implement an approach that protects nursing homes.

Overall, I am only mildly on the “opener” side. My problem with Lockdown Socialism is the socialism.

By socialism, I mean the money-printing orgy to have the government send feel-good stimulus checks to households while lavishing bailouts on banks and other large corporations, without raising taxes or cutting spending elsewhere. I also mean taking capital allocation out of the private sector and giving it to the Fed. Whatever the intentions of the backers of the “stimulus” or the “quantitive easing” might be, inflationary finance and turning the Fed into Gosplan are the most important consequences. And in this case, I am going to insist on judging the consequences, not just the intentions.

Another forecast gets bitten by the Tuesday effect? The Texas people were sure that we had passed the peak in one-day death rates. But today was the biggest one-day death rate, at least according to this tabulation.

The 3DDRR only went up a bit, to 1.17. Outside NY, it is at 1.21

The main point of tracking the 3DDRR is to get an idea of what the trend in infections was a few weeks earlier. And I don’t see any point at which you can argue that “Aha, this was when the lockdowns got going, and you can see that a few weeks later the spread rate started to plummet.”

Lockdowns started to become widespread around March 20. So we would expect the big decline in the increase in deaths to begin somewhere between April 5 and April 15. But if you look at the chart, the big decline in the death rate was taking place from around March 26 through April 6, and subsequently the declines have been more gradual.

Perhaps the lockdowns failed to dramatically reduce the overall spread rate. But I think that a more likely scenario is that they did slow the spread rate–among the population that is least likely to die from the disease. The overall death rate remained high, because we have not figured out how to protect the elderly, particularly in nursing homes.

If my hypothesis is correct, then a weekly series of random-sample tests in the population would show a sharp decline in the spread rate, but a demographic breakdown of deaths by week would show an increase in the proportion of deaths among the elderly. I know we don’t have the former data. Are the latter data available?

[Note: I had technical difficulties with an earlier version of this post]
Yesterday’s post on lockdown socialism was unusual for me, in that it was not aimed at persuading someone who might disagree. Let me approach the topic by trying to make the best case for the other side.
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I’ve seen headlines about polls showing that people are afraid of restrictions being lifted too soon. To me, it sounds as if they prefer what I call Lockdown Socialism.

Under Lockdown Socialism:

–you can stay in your residence, but paying rent or paying your mortgage is optional.

–you can obtain groceries and shop on line, but having a job is optional.

–other people work at farms, factories, and distribution services to make sure that you have food on the table, but you can sit at home waiting for a vaccine.

–people still work in nursing homes that have lost so many patients that they no longer have enough revenue to make payroll.

–professors and teachers are paid even though schools are shut down.

–police protect your property even though they are at risk for catching the virus and criminals are being set free.

–state and local governments will continue paying employees even though sales tax revenue has collapsed.

–if you own a small business, you don’t need revenue, because the government will keep sending checks.

–if you own shares in an airline, a bank, or other fragile corporations, don’t worry, the Treasury will work something out.

This might not be sustainable.

1.18 overall and 1.18 excluding New York. Stunning one-day slowdowns in several states, including New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, and Louisiana. We will see how much the reporting catches up the next two days.

1. A study from Italy.

We found no statistically significant difference in the viral load (as measured by genome equivalents inferred from cycle threshold data) of symptomatic versus asymptomatic infections

Pointer from Megan McArdle.

Although the margin that I care about is mild vs. severe rather than symptomatic vs. asymptomatic, this is somewhat discouraging for those of us who would like to believe that getting the virus in low amounts would be ok.

Note the the study measures viral load among people after they have the virus, not viral load at onset. I think the only way to make guesses about viral load at onset is to do case studies that look at how people got the virus.

I think that what this study strongly reinforces is the hypothesis of asymptomatic spreading.

2. A case study that suggests being in the path of airconditioning flow and an asymptomatic spreader gave people the disease.

I now think that these sorts of case studies are going to be the best way to gather useful evidence about the virus. I would especially like to see case studies that can help assess whether there is anything we can do to affect whether one gets a mild or severe case.