Category Archives: Tyler Cowen is my Favorite Blogger

General update, May 11

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1. How Portland is using the worst legislation in history to loot.

So Oregon’s largest district has hatched a plan to have its employees work four days a week for the remainder of this school year, and it is banking on its unionized employees agreeing to the deal. Employees would lose 20% of their pay from the district but would have that more than backfilled by receiving 20% of the weekly state unemployment benefit to which they are entitled under the state Work Share program plus the full $600 weekly federal match.

Pointer from David Henderson. Note that some private sector firms, such as Shake Shack, chose to refrain from looting. But our public servants have no such qualms.

2. Boris Johnson addressing the British people (video, pointer from John Alcorn). Lots of power rhetoric. To my ear, he doesn’t trust the people to make good decisions. He only trusts them to sacrifice and obey rules.

3. You can look up the track record of models, for U.S. states and other countries. Pointer from JA.

4. Ian Hall and others write,

it is important to observe that the 73% value is the prevalence of care homes with outbreaks and not the incidence. This means homes should expect to suffer multiple importations over time. These outbreaks will accumulate cases so the final attack rate within a home may be large due to a mix of explosive outbreaks and repeated importation.

Pointer from JA. The article is about the UK. I give them credit for at least focusing on the topic of nursing homes (care homes in Brit-speak). I believe that there are now thousands of research papers on the virus, but my guess is that about 10 or fewer of them focus on nursing homes, which is where such a large share of the deaths and large outbreaks have taken place.

5. Chris Pope discusses nursing homes in the U.S.

With schools closed, many long-term-care workers have children to look after and would earn more under the CARES Act by staying home than by going to work, where they may risk getting infected and infecting family members. As a result, many nursing homes are currently staffed at less than 50 percent—putting further strain on those workers who remain and causing safety standards to slip even further.

6. Bryan Caplan on the case for paid human experimentation. That would be voluntary. What we have instead is involuntary human experimentation, using lockdown protocols. And the results of these experiments is never clear.

7. Lars Christensen writes,

once the lockdowns come to an end people will be able to return to work – not necessarily to their old jobs and not necessarily in the sectors they used to work in, but the reason they haven’t been working is not that their reservation wage were higher than their productivity so there is little reason why we shouldn’t see the share of temporarily unemployed come down very fast in the coming few months.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who writes “Not my view, but happy to pass along.” As I see it, Christensen is applying conventional macro theory. Aggregate demand is not really damaged, because permanent income is not down. It is a short-term aggregate supply shock, and soon all will be well. I think of it in PSST terms, and once patterns of trade have been disrupted it takes a long time to discover new patterns. I hope he is right and I am wrong.

General update, May 10

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1. In Connecticut,

Between April 22 and April 29, the state’s death total rose from 1,544 to 2,089, or 545 new deaths, according to data released by the state Department of Public Health. In that same seven-day period nursing home deaths rose from 768 to 1,249, meaning 481 among the 545 new deaths — about 88% — were nursing home patients.

We have a friend who lives in the highest-end elder-care facility in the St. Louis area. She is truly locked down. The front door is guarded, and the residents are not allowed out. They can outside into the back courtyard, but they cannot leave the facility. They can receive grocery deliveries. Meals are not eaten in the cafeteria, but instead are placed in front of the door, wrapped in plastic.

The nation’s governors are fighting on the beaches, they’re fighting in the fields, . . .and the real battle is in the nursing homes. Not our finest hour.

2. I recommend this Heying-Weinstein podcast from yesterday. I listened at 1.25x speed, because he talks slowly for my taste. From about minute 30 to minute 47 they discuss the issue of whether the virus likely originated in nature, came from a lab intentionally, or came from a lab by accident. I think they would put their money on “came from a lab by accident,” and their arguments make sense to me.

On another topic, they are not “openers.” Of course, they raise concerns about deaths from the virus, as do all “closers.” My responses are two fold. One is that it is not fair to assume that everyone will immediately revert to gathering in closed spaces and traveling as much as they were before. The other is that with so many of the deaths in nursing homes, I am not convinced that the marginal saving of life from locking down the rest of us is all that high.

One argument that they make as evolutionary biologists is that the more that we expose humans to the virus, the more chances we give the virus to evolve in ways that make it more adept at infecting people.

My problem with that argument is that it seems to me that a lockdown only stops the virus from adapting if we eradicate the virus. But the lockdowns we have are not going to eradicate the virus. Those of us who shelter in place need to eat, which means that there are people out there who need to move around to get food to us.

It seems to me that these two people for whom I have great respect have allowed themselves to fall into the “moving goal posts” fallacy. The lockdown that was originally sold as delaying the spread of the virus is now being defended as if it could eradicate the virus.

As a thought experiment, a total worldwide lockdown that is militarily enforced might be sufficient to eradicate the virus. But the partial, flatten-the-curve lockdown does nothing in the long run to deprive the virus of opportunities to explore mutation space.

3. Clare Malone and Kyle Bourassa write,

Almost uniformly across these states, people started staying home beginning on March 14. The percentage of people staying home rose rapidly over the following nine days and tended to plateau by March 23.

The Cuebiq data suggests that behavioral changes were largely driven by people making a voluntary choice to stay home rather than being forced to do so by a state-sanctioned stay-at-home order. One need only look at the behavior of residents in North Carolina and their neighbors in South Carolina: While North Carolina issued a stay-at-home order eight days before South Carolina, a stabilized number of people in both states started staying at home about a week before North Carolina’s order.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. In mid-March, people were making decisions to restrict activity independently of what political leaders were telling them to do. I don’t think that has changed.

General update, May 7

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1. Tina Lu and Ben Y. Reis write,

We found that Internet search patterns reveal a robust temporal pattern of disease progression for COVID-19: Initial symptoms of fever, dry cough, sore throat and chills are followed by shortness of breath an average of 5.22 days [95% CI 3.30-7.14] after symptom onset, matching the precise clinical course reported in the medical literature. Furthermore, we found that increases in COVID-19-symptom-related searches predict increases in reported COVID-19 cases and deaths 18.53 days [95% CI 15.98-21.08] and 22.16 days [95% CI 20.33-23.99] in advance, respectively. This is the first study to show that Internet search patterns can be used to reveal the detailed clinical course of a disease. These data can be used to track and predict the local spread of COVID-19 before widespread laboratory testing becomes available in each country, helping to guide the current public health response.

Pointer from John Alcorn.

2. In another Alcorn pointer, Elizabeth Williamson and others conducted a large cohort analysis of British patients. My sense of these studies is that we always see a very strong relationship between age and death rates and higher mortality for men than women. Which co-morbidities show up as significant varies, and I suspect this is due to the way that these tend to correlate with age. If you specify the age variable in a sophisticated, non-linear way, its explanatory power will be such that co-morbidities may not show much independent effect.

I would like to see some of these explanatory models run with no age variable at all, to see how much variation you can explain with co-morbidities alone. My guess is that such equations will explain a smaller share of the variance, but they may offer better insight into the relative importance of different co-morbidities.

Here is a press release for the study.

3. A software engineer criticizes the Imperial model.

It’s clear from reading the code that in 2014 Imperial tried to make the code use multiple CPUs to speed it up, but never made it work reliably. This sort of programming is known to be difficult and usually requires senior, experienced engineers to get good results. Results that randomly change from run to run are a common consequence of thread-safety bugs.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

4. From a correspondent:

I am a small business owner, and I see a big problem with the PPP Loans that is not discussed in the media.

PPP loan forgiveness is planned as a percentage of payroll costs over the eight weeks following loan distribution. Therefore, businesses that continue to operate, with normal payroll costs, expect to receive large loan forgiveness. However, those aren’t the businesses that need forgiveness; they have continued to operate. The businesses who need the money are shut down, don’t have any payroll costs, and will therefore receive little forgiveness.

My business has continued to operate with a modest decline in sales. On my application, I could honestly certify, “current economic uncertainty makes [the] loan request necessary to support the ongoing operations of the Applicant”; I am certainly facing plenty of uncertainty. However, I am unlikely to actually need the money.

I accepted the loan and will ask for forgiveness, because if the government is handing out free money, I am going to accept; the government takes plenty of my money without asking. While there might be a few angels who don’t apply for the PPP loan, most self-interested owners will accept forgiveness. As one of my industry colleagues said to another, “Time to PPParty!”

The solution? Make the PPP loans non-forgivable LOANS, with a long (5 years?) repayment period at 0-1% interest.

PPP was rushed out – rightly in my opinion — because of the immediate nature of the problem, but Congress has time to change the program in the six months before forgiveness and repayment start.

Nobody who already accepted loans will be hurt. They can simply repay the loan.

If PPP is changed from grants to loans, owners facing huge losses from closure can at least amortize that loss over a period of years to enable them to remain in business. Furthermore, there remains the possibility to forgive some loans in the future, after more careful analysis of actual losses incurred.

5. Tomaz Cajner and others write,

Using weekly, anonymized administrative payroll data from the largest U.S. payroll processing company, we measure the deterioration of the U.S. labor market during the first two months of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We find that U.S. private-sector employment contracted by about 22 percent between mid-February and mid-April. Businesses suspending operations—perhaps temporarily—account for a significant share of employment losses, particularly among smaller businesses. Hours worked for continuing workers fell by 4.5 percent. We highlight large differences in employment declines by industry, business size, state of residence, and demographic group. Workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution experienced a 35 percent employment decline while those in the top quintile experienced only a 9 percent decline.

General update, May 5

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1. A reader writes, “epidemiology as GDP-factory-ism”

So many epidemiology models seem to use THE value for R, or THE case fatality rate (CFR) or THE infection fatality rate (IFR). But these rates differ for different people and different circumstances. It seems the same kind of simplification that treats output as a single something. The simplification can be useful some times but there is such a temptation to use it without asking that question.

If you want to know why I am so adamant and ornery about the models, that is it. They remind me of macroeconometric models, which I am confident are misguided.

The modelers are still at it. The NYT reports,

The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.

I would like to make the following bet with these modelers. I bet that the daily death toll in the last two weeks of May averages less than 2500. Whoever loses the bet has to shut up. If I lose, I stop blogging about the virus. If the modelers lose, then they have to stop reporting results from their models.

Note that Daron Acemoglu and others have disaggregated the typical model into more than one risk bucket. Tyler Cowen enthuses, “I would say we are finally making progress.” I say it’s just more social-engineering drunks searching under the lamppost.

2. Another reader points to an essay by Sean Trende. Difficult to excerpt, the essay seems quite rational to me.

No states are on anything resembling an exponential growth trajectory, almost all states are past a peak, and most states are substantially so. This would suggest that in many states, the question really should be how to reopen while keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed again.

As Tyler Cowen once predicted, we went from insufficient fear to excess fear. With excess fear, it will be difficult to re-start the economy. Even if restrictions are lifted, people will not be confident as consumers or entrepreneurs.

3. Alberto M. Borobia and others look at a cohort of patients at a major teaching hospital in Madrid. It is worth poring over the tables at the end. As I read table 3, out of 665 patients under age 50, only 5 died. That is a mortality rate of less than 1 percent among those hospitalized. To compute the overall infection fatality rate for those in that age group, one would have to multiply by the probability that an infected person becomes hospitalized. If the latter is 0.1, for example, then the IFR would be less than 1 in a thousand. Pointer from John Alcorn.

He also points to a study by Zichen Wang and others of patients in three New York hospitals. As I read the tables, obesity does not seem to be associated with a greater likelihood of death, but hypertension does.

And he points to yet another study, in the LA area. They find that a big difference of male vs. female.

One thing I would like to see from these cohort studies is a really careful analysis of the relationship between the risk from age and the risk from comorbidities, given that the high correlation between the two.

4. Robin Hanson writes,

We are starting to open, and will continue to open, as long as opening is the main well-supported alternative to the closed status quo, which we can all see isn’t working as fast as expected, and plausibly not fast enough to be a net gain. Hearing elites debate a dozen other alternatives, each supported by different theories and groups, will not be enough to resist that pressure to open.

Winning at politics requires more than just prestige, good ideas, and passion. It also requires compromise, to produce sufficient unity. At this game, elites are now failing, while the public is not.

I am not rooting for the elites to win. I don’t think any top-down solution is going to work well. Letting individuals decide which risks they are willing to take is probably the best approach. As someone who will be making risk-averse choices, I do not think others’ riskier choices pose a significant threat to me.

5. A commenter writes,

We shouldn’t be trying to conquer fear so we can go back to the old economy. We should be building the new economy that has an order of magnitude fewer casual human interactions.

Maybe this is overstating it. But I do think that we will see new patterns of specialization and trade, and we need a lot of capitalism to get there.

General update, May 4

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Many interesting links from Tyler Cowen yesterday.

1. Stephen M. Hedrick wrote in 2004,

Perhaps we should not assume that each and every disease can be controlled by vaccination. Considering the biological invention that has been directed toward thwarting T cell responses and antibody reactions, the possibility exists that for some agents, the acquired immune system is not up to the task. Other avenues of treatment might be more efficacious, but in a more fatalistic vein, one might conclude that the most effective means of controlling disease, as it has always been, is public sanitation, vector control, and education. A parasite can’t replicate in a host to which it has no access. It is antithetical to biomedical science as practiced in western countries, but technology may not be the answer to most of the world’s infectious diseases.

2. David Goldhill sounds like me.

3. Dhal M. Dave and others write concerning shelter in place orders (SIPOs),

using daily state-level measures of social mobility from SafeGraph, Inc., we document that statewide SIPOs were associated with a 5 to 10 percent increase (relative to the pre-treatment period) in the share of the population that sheltered in place completely on anygiven day. This treatment-control differential increases during the first week following SIPO adoption and then remains constant or slightly declines. Next, turning to COVID-19, difference-in-differences estimates show that the adoption of a SIPO had little effect on COVID-19 cases during the five (5) days following its enactment, corresponding to the median incubation period. However, after the incubation period, and intensifying rapidly three weeks or more after the policy’s adoption, SIPO adoption is associated with an up to 43.7 percent decline in COVID-19 cases. Approximately 3 to 4 weeks following SIPO adoption, this corresponds to approximately 2,510 fewer cumulative COVID-19 cases for the average SIPO-adopting state. Evidence from event study analyses is consistent with common pre-treatment trends. . .While statewide SIPOs were negatively related to coronavirus-related deaths, but estimated mortality effects were imprecisely estimated.

My guess is that if they could have shown that government restrictions lower death rates, they would have shouted it from the rooftops.

4. CNBC reports,

data released from the country’s central bank and a leading Swedish think tank show that the economy will be just as badly hit as its European neighbors, if not worse.

Pointer from Scott Sumner. I agree with Scott that this is no surprise.

Lin and Meissner find

Job losses have been no higher in US states that implemented “stay-at-home” during the Covid-19 pandemic than in states that did not have “stayat-home”.

Pointer from John Alcorn.

Most of the change in behavior comes from individual decisions. At the margin, the government restrictions are probably stupid. They keep hospitals from performing helpful procedures on non-virus patients. They restrict access to beaches and parks, when it is likely that fresh air is a good thing nowadays. They impose the greatest change in behavior on the young people with the lowest risk. And they do not have a visible effect on death rates–probably because the people who are at risk and have choices about behavior are already doing what they can to minimize their exposure to the virus.

5. Russ Roberts says that we need to let the price system work in the market for masks.

Markets are failing in America because we’re not letting them work. It’s not a market failure. It’s a policy failure.

. . .You get more stuff when you let the price go up. We should use prices in a crisis, not just in normal times.

6. Bryan Caplan writes,

Populists notwithstanding, there is nothing “dishonorable” about raising prices to eliminate shortages. If governments or customers refuse to see this great truth, there is nothing dishonorable about raising prices in less-visible ways. Businesspeople, you do not merely have a right to “gouge.” As long as shortages persist, gouging is the right thing to do. Gouge is good!

His point is that business owners themselves are too reticent about raising prices.

7. J. Feliz-Cardoso and others write,

The EuroMOMO network monitors weekly all-cause age-specific excess mortality in countries in Europe through a standardised approach.

Can one find anything comparable here? The authors recalculate excess mortality using their own methods. They seem to find that it is concentrated among those over age 65, especially men.

The Cowen-Weyl interview

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I enjoyed the transcript of Tyler Cowen’s talk with Glen Weyl more than I expected. One part:

COWEN: Look at Robin Hanson. Robin, to me, is rebelling against hypocrisy. I think he even might agree with that. What are you rebelling against?
WEYL: I think I’m most deeply rebelling against the separation between the role of the expert and the role of the politically engaged person. I grew up wanting to be a politician for long periods, and also wanting to be a physicist for long periods, and I’m deeply frustrated by the ways in which these things are these separate and contradictory roles in our society. I’m struggling to straddle the divide.
COWEN: Well, that’s a good answer. But if you had to boil it down to something more foundational, what institutional failure or what personal quality lies behind that? What would that be? Why do we screw that thing up?
WEYL: Singular identity is one way of putting it. Many people who are economists think they’re an economist. Many people who think that they’re libertarian think they’re libertarian. Every identity that I’ve been part of, that I thought I believed in, ended up having so much corruption entwined in it, and ultimately, it’s the plurality and intersection of those things where I find meaning.

I would say that in the realm of public intellectuals, I rebel against engineers and admire epistemologists. I distrust people who come up with clever engineering solutions to problems, such as test, track, and trace for the virus crisis. For me, an epistemologist is someone who constantly wrestles with the issue of what is true.

A non-epistemologist relies on a simple heuristic, like trusting what they read in their favorite media outlet, or looking for a “consensus of the experts.” An epistemologist asks how such a consensus was tested and why it has been preserved. If the sociology of the domain is such that the high-status people have the incentive and means to bully everyone else into submission, then the “consensus of the experts” is not all that reliable.

General update, April 29

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1. John Cochrane on the financial plight of universities.

One might say that universities have an over-bloated staff and a lot of deadwood so this might not be a terrible thing. But that requires an administration ready to impose pain on entrenched constituencies. Not hiring promising new researchers is a lot easier.

The worst thing to be right now is someone who will graduate with a Ph.D in a month. Cochrane has many other insights. Read the whole post.

2. From the NYT.

The difference in investor expectations for large and small companies is stark: The Nasdaq 100, an index of the largest technology companies — which also happen to be the largest companies in the country — is down 0.6 percent this year. The Russell 2000 index, which tracks small public companies, is down 22 percent — roughly double the 11 percent in losses for the S&P 500.

Wall Street thinks that it will be fine if not a single bank or goes under but thousands of small businesses disappear. I am guessing that they are counting on milder social unrest than might be expected.

3.

Inside Higher Ed reports,

Ten percent of college-bound seniors who had planned to enroll at a four-year college before the COVID-19 outbreak have already made alternative plans.

Fourteen percent of college students said they were unlikely to return to their current college or university in the fall, or it was “too soon to tell.” Exactly three weeks later, in mid-April, that figure had gone up to 26 percent.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I don’t think that the higher education lobby will let this happen. That sector is going to get a decent amount of the money that is being printed these days.

General update, April 28

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1. Peter Zeihan writes,

Despite its smaller population, Iowa has half-again more COVID-19 cases than Minnesota. I’ve little doubt that this is due to Iowa still having no stay-at-home orders from the governor as well as the fact that Iowa hosts the country’s densest cluster of meatpacking facilities.

But despite Iowa’s much larger overall caseload, the state has also suffered fewer than half the deaths from COVID as Minnesota. Over ¾ of Iowa’s positive cases are in people aged 65 and younger, an age group that is highly likely to survive the virus. Minnesota’s cases are skewed into older age groups, making death more likely.

2. Tyler Cowen notes that people are turning toward comfort music and comfort food. I would add “comfort news” to the list. For the right, it’s news that supports the view that the virus is no worse than the flu. Right-wing sites are still all over the Santa Clara study as proof of that. For the left, comfort news includes analysis that blames the virus crisis on President Trump. The left also seems to want stories that show that remote learning and/or charter schools are really awful. There is a recent NYT story filled with such anecdotes. Meanwhile, I know a private school teacher who says that she is trying to make the best of it, noting that in this environment she has the ability to mute a student at the touch of a button.

3. WBUR reports,

After Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston began requiring that nearly everyone in the hospital wear masks, new coronavirus infections diagnosed in its staffers dropped by half — or more.

Brigham and Women’s epidemiologist Dr. Michael Klompas said the hospital mandated masks for all health care staffers on March 25, and extended the requirement to patients as well on April 6.

Pointer from Scott Sumner, who has other interesting items in his post.

4. Scott also points to a Vox story pooh-poohing the notion that the virus came from a Chinese lab. The story does not address the argument made by Weinstein/Heying that bats and pangolins do not ordinarily hang out together (I cannot explain why this makes the virus unnatural, but that is what they say).

5. Michael T. Olsterholm and Mark Olshaker write,

The F.D.A. must bring order to this chaos and determine which tests work well. It should stick to its normal review process but expedite it by giving it top priority with its clinical reviewers and bringing in more reviewers as necessary.

But they also write,

as long as testing for SARS-CoV-2 is too limited or unreliable, the United States must ramp up what public health professionals call “syndromic surveillance”: the practice by medical personnel of observing, recording and reporting telltale patterns of symptoms in patients

I also feel better about low-tech methods than I do about the technocrats’ favorites of models and tests.

6. Casey B. Mulligan, Kevin M. Murphy, and Robert H. Topel write,

If an extensive shutdown of economic activity costs $7 trillion, largely in terms of economic hardship, and a limited response would lead to a $6 trillion loss of life, then an intermediate solution could, in principle, achieve a great deal.

If you are salivating for a cost-benefit analysis, these may be your guys. I just skimmed it, then I did a search for the word “mask” which came up empty, and decided to dismiss it. Tyler Cowen says “They think like economists,” which would only be praise if we didn’t know that they are economists.

7. Derek Thompson writes,

In the early innings of this crisis, the most resilient companies include blue-chip retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General, Costco, and Home Depot, all of whose stock prices are at or near record highs. Meanwhile, most small retailers—like hair salons, cafés, flower shops, and gyms—have less than one month’s cash on hand. One survey of several thousand small businesses, including hotels, theaters, and bars, found that just 30 percent of them expect to survive a lockdown that lasts four months.

Big companies have several advantages over smaller independents in a crisis. They have more cash reserves, better access to capital, and a general counsel’s office to furlough employees in an orderly fashion. Most important, their relationships with government and banks put them at the front of the line for bailouts.

Pointer from Tyler. That last sentence is the important one. The politicians talk about helping small business, but it’s the banks and the big companies that will wind up getting most of the newly-printed money.

Ironically, I think that ordinary people, as opposed to government officials, want to do the opposite. They want to support small businesses, and they don’t worry about the banks much. The contrast between the preferences of the people that earn money and the looting class that prints money could create some social tension in the months and years ahead.

General update, April 22

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1. Joshua Coven and Arpit Gupta write,

This paper uses mobile phone Global Positioning System (GPS) data to examine the mobility responses of neighborhoods in New York City affected by COVID-19. We show three key findings regarding differential mobility responses across neighborhoods. First, richer and younger neighborhoods see far greater increases in the propensity of individuals to leave the city, starting around March 14, 2020. These individual moves are well-proxied by networks of Facebook friends in the areas they move to, suggesting that richer and younger New York City residents are able to shelter in second homes and with friends and family away from the epicenter of the outbreak.

Which probably explains why Pennsylvania and Maryland have such high 3DDRRs right now. Just about every friend in Maryland that I have with kids who were living in New York has their kids staying with them right now. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

2. In the WSJ, Daniel Michaels writes,

“People have realized that with all the differences in testing, looking at all causes of death is a much better proxy for the impact of Covid,” said Lasse S. Vestergaard, an epidemiologist in Denmark’s national institute for infectious disease

Read the entire article, which raises several important issues.

3. In an essay on the current political climate, I write

Controversy over lockdowns has drawn people on both sides to demonize one another. Opponents of lockdowns assert that the virus is “just the flu,” implying that lockdown supporters are overreacting. Supporters of lockdowns assert that “all it takes to beat the virus is to have the fortitude to stay home and play video games,” implying that lockdown opponents are wimps.

4. Alberto Mingardi says that Italians enjoy less liberty than they did under Mussolini, but not because fascism has re-emerged as an ideology. He calls it “unintended authoritarianism.”

I would say the same thing about Lockdown Socialism. The legislators who voted for the CARES act and the people who think it is a good thing are not socialists. That makes it even scarier. I would rather fight an ideology than a consensus.

We adopted lockdowns and socialism as desperate short-term expedients. Neither approach is sustainable. But at least people are thinking about an exist strategy for the lockdowns. No one is even considering an exit strategy for the socialism.

5. A commenter points to this story.

The Medical Examiner-Coroner performed autopsies on two individuals who died at home on February 6, 2020 and February 17, 2020. Samples from the two individuals were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, the Medical Examiner-Coroner received confirmation from the CDC that tissue samples from both cases are positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).

February 6 is very early. It makes one wonder when the virus started infecting people there.

6. NPR story on the woes of colleges.

In the CARES relief package passed in March, Congress allocated about $14 billion for colleges and universities, though many have said that’s not enough. “Woefully inadequate” is what the American Council on Education called it. The group, along with 40 other higher education organizations, have lobbied Congress for about $46 billion more. And that’s a conservative ask, they say.

I predict that they get at least 75 percent of what they ask for. In Washington, you don’t mess with these guys.

7. Eyal Klement and others write,

Instead of using non93 discriminating measures targeted at the population as a whole, we propose regulated voluntary exposure of its low-risk members. Once they are certified as immune, these individuals return to the population, increase its overall immunity and resume their normal life. This approach is akin to avalanche control at ski resorts, a practice which intentionally triggers small avalanches in order to prevent a singular catastrophic one. Its main goal is to create herd immunity, faster than current alternatives, and with lower mortality rates and lower demand for critical health-care resources. Furthermore, it is also expected to be effective in relieving the huge economic pressures created by the current pandemic

They do some simulation exercises with a model and say that this will work. But the results are pretty much baked in, base on their assumptions that exposure creates immunity, that it will be easy to know when the people you expose have stopped shedding virus, and that people aged 20-49 are at low risk and thus can be safely exposed. Another assumption that I think is worth mentioning is that we don’t discover a good treatment for the virus over the next month or two. I wonder much we can trust those assumptions to be satisfied.

But note that lockdown is pretty much the opposite strategy. So implicitly we are making the opposite assumptions, and we should be wondering how much we can trust that.

General update, April 21

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1. A podcast that Brandon Adams did with me this morning. He asked good questions. Maybe my answers were a bit long, but I think you will like it. I recommend listening at 1.5x speed.

1. Niall Ferguson writes,

let’s not pretend that the pandemic illustrates the case for big government. The US already has big government. And this is what it does: agencies, laws, reports, PowerPoint presentations… and then — when the endlessly discussed crisis actually happens — paralysis, followed by panic.

Today, the US has fallen back on the old 20th-century playbook of pandemic pluralism (states do their own thing; in some states a lot of people die), but combining it with the 2009-10 playbook of financial crisis management. The result is insane. A large chunk of the economy has been shut down by government order; meanwhile the national debt explodes, along with the balance sheet of the US Federal Reserve.

Pointer from John Cochrane. I am in the process of writing an essay tentatively titled “Changing the Playbook” The two paragraphs above are almost a precis of the essay, including his use of the term “playbook.”

2. Earlier, John Cochrane wrote,

The greatest financial bailout of all time is underway. It’s 2008 on steroids. Yet where is the outrage? The silence is deafening. Remember the Tea Party and occupy Wall Street? “Never again” they said in 2008. Now everyone just wants the Fed to print more money, faster.

Read the whole post. Of course, I have not been silent. Coining the expression Lockdown Socialism is about as loud as I can get.

3. A reader sends long the list of educational institutions receiving funds under the CARES act. I’m sure that as a taxpayer you are happy to contribute to this cause.

4. Christopher Avery and others write,

Some researchers have conjectured that exposure to a higher “viral load” can result in more severe illness. . .As American doctors Rabinowitz and Bartman comment, “Dose sensitivity has been observed for every common acute viral infection that has been studied in lab animals, including coronaviruses”

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who recommends the whole paper. There are little nuggets scattered throughout. But I don’t think that the economist’s training to think in terms of mathematical models is the best way to approach the problem. “Patterns and stories” is a better framework.

5. Tyler Cowen quotes from a correspondent.

Protecting the most vulnerable effectively while infecting the least vulnerable quickly could theoretically save almost everyone for this particular disease.

That is a succinct statement of the results of my analytical matrix Sooner or Later, Mild or Severe.