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.

Overall 1.14, outside of New York 1.18

One factor that affects daily totals at the covid tracking site that I rely on is that not all states have reported totals by the time that the site updates. Sometimes it means that it shows fewer deaths per day than the worldometers site, but today it is showing more, presumably because some state totals yesterday were reported late and showed up today in the covid tracking site.

Note that when New York “caught up” with about 4000 deaths from much earlier, the worldometers tallied them but the covidtracking site did not.

Anyway, I plan to wait until Tuesday to pronounce on the trend, if any.

1. Paul Romer wrote,

The simulated data here contrast policies that isolate people who test positive using four different assumptions about the quality of the test. Even a very bad test cuts the fraction of the population who are ultimately infected almost in half. And when I say bad, I mean bad – an 80% false negative rate

Pointer from commenter John Alcorn.

For a test-and-quarantine policy to be useful, you don’t have to pull every infected person out of circulation. Think of it as a race between how many infected people you pull out of circulation and how many people get infected by the folks who your test fails to catch. You come out ahead compared to doing nothing.

But a test can be bad the other way, easily producing one false positive for every true positive. You could easily end up quarantining one healthy person for every sick person. Of course, what we are doing now is at least as arbitrary.

Tyler Cowen points to a paper with a model (what else?) that supports doing testing and confining even when the tests are bad.

I’m sure it works well in the model. In the real world, I can think of a number of difficulties with execution. Show me a project management chart that includes all the steps needed before you can even start. Then with flawed tests, it takes much longer to get the benefits, and more costs are imposed on the false positives.

2. Henrik Salje and others write,

As of 14 April 2020, there had been 71,903 incident hospitalizations due to SARS-CoV-2 reported in France and 10,129 deaths in hospitals, with the east of the country and the capital, Paris, particularly affected. The mean age of hospitalized patients was 68y and the mean age of the deceased was 79y with 50.0% of hospitalizations occurring in individuals >70y and 81.6% of deaths within that age bracket; 56.2% of hospitalizations and 60.3% of deaths were male

Another Alcorn pointer. They try to get beyond numerator analysis and estimate the infection fatality rates for different demographic groups. But their methods struck me as sketchy, so I am just quoting the raw data.

3. Frances MK Williams and others write,

Here we report that 50% of the variance of ‘predicted covid-19’ phenotype is due to genetic factors. The current prevalence of ‘predicted covid-19’ is 2.9% of the population. Symptoms related to immune activation such as fever, delirium and fatigue have a heritability >35%. The symptom of anosmia, that we previously reported to be an important predictive symptom of covid-19, was also heritable at 48%. Symptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, rather than representing a purely stochastic event, is under host genetic influence to some extent and may reflect inter-individual variation in the host immune response. Viral infections typically lead to T cell activation with IL-1, IL-6 and TNF-α release causing flu-like symptoms such as fever. The genetic basis of this variability in response will provide important clues for therapeutics and lead to identification of groups at high risk of death, which is associated with a cytokine storm at 1-2 weeks after symptom onset

They use a twin-study method to estimate heritability. Another pointer from John Alcorn.

4. Veronique de Rugy and me on the credit line idea.

Roughly 99.9 percent of American firms, or 30 million, fit the definition of small business used by the Small Business Administration (SBA), and together these firms employ roughly 65 percent of American workers. The devastation of the small-business sector could therefore be disastrous for American families.

The stock market is relatively placid, and meanwhile a whole way of life seems about to go under for many people. That might not be sustainable.

I readily grant that if left to their own devices many individuals will make sub-optimal decisions, but primarily costing themselves and not others. I also believe that if individuals were left to their own devices we would not see anything close to what “re-opening the economy” sounds like. But giving decision-making power to President Trump and the various governors seems more obviously right to most other people than it does to me.

5. A data visualization, by state, based on the source I use to calculate 3DDRR. Pointer from Russ Roberts.

6. Olivier Blanchard writes,

a high inflation scenario requires the combination of three ingredients, each of which has a low probability of occurring in advanced economies. Put your own probabilities and multiply them: The resulting probability is very small. I asked some of my colleagues for their probabilities, and the product always came below 3 percent.

His high inflation scenario is one in which our government can no longer pay the bills except by printing money. That is actually a hyperinflation scenario, as I imagine Blanchard would agree. Even at a probability of less than 3 percent, Anti-fragile Arnold does not want to take those chances.

Overall, stayed at 1.18 Outside New York, edged up to 1.23

Aaron Lindsey’s chart.

Commenter Blink’s chart, showing the 7DDRR. Smooth, gradual decline, starting at the end of March, before you would expect the lockdowns to affect deaths, and lately becoming an agonizingly slow decline.