11 thoughts on “General update, April 5”

  1. https://nypost.com/2020/04/05/anthony-fauci-says-its-likely-coronavirus-will-become-seasonal/

    Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert on the White House coronavirus task force, said Sunday it is likely that the virus will become a seasonal illness.

    “Unless we get this globally under control there is a very good chance that it’ll assume a seasonal nature,” Fauci told CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

    Fauci said that even if the world is able to largely contain COVID-19 soon, there still needs to be preparation for a resurgence.

    “We need to be prepared that since it will be unlikely to be completely eradicated from the planet that as we get into next season we may see the beginning of a resurgence,” he said.
    —-

    My original model: What does this look like at equilibrium. Using my back of the envelope and assuming equilibrium everywhere, I compute about 1 in 40 neighborhoods will see an outbreak each year. The key ratio is immune time vs remission time, assuming the transmission rate stays constant everywhere during equilibrium, not not equal everywhere.

    I did this on the back of a dirty smudged envelope with erase marks everywhere and a dull pencil barely legible.

  2. “If this keeps up, in another week there will be a ferocious argument over whether it is time to lift the lockdowns.”

    According to commenter Rif A. Saurous, there is a 3-week delay between policy implementation and measured death rates. If true, that would seem to imply that lockdown policies could at least be rolled back to whatever they were 3 weeks prior (to 1 wk from now, so 2 weeks prior to today), no?

  3. You want to compute the death rate growth measure relative to a ten day lag of it. The average period from infection to death is something like ten days.

    If Bronx zoo tigers in double cages catch the virus, why is anyone expecting the current lockdowns for humans to achieve anything other than a minor delay? Should we be locked down more securely than Bronx zoo tigers?

    If hospital therapy leads to only a modest increase in survival probability once you factor in the positives from ventilators and negatives from antibiotic resistant hospital bacteria, what’s the point of paying the huge economics costs froM minor flattening of the curve?

  4. I don’t think there will be a lot of people clamoring to let up lockdowns until the daily death rate is well past its peak, which it has not reached.

    I could imagine at the end of April maybe having more debate, or maybe it will be regional. I know some areas aren’t expecting the peak until after early May.

    • I also think that the peak will vary by state/city by quite a bit. Those with peaks coming in early May won’t want to stop lock downs until late May.

    • With regards to supporting the lockdowns, you can imagine a distribution from insistence to disdain.

      Maybe an old, frail retired person who owns his own home and lives on social security has little to lose from a lockdown, but would probably die if he got sick. Sometimes he helps babysit his little great-grandkid, who behaves as if Skynet designed the perfect disease-vector Terminator. So he’s pro lockdown.

      A young, healthy person who is most likely effectively immune since he won’t get any serious symptoms if he gets infected, and who went into huge debt to start a small business that the lockdown destroyed, is probably con.

      Maybe the old man is the young man’s grandfather and cares about his welfare, and vice versa, so interests are complicated.

      Also, you can imagine someone in the middle, with medium risk, medium insulation vs hardship, medium levels of support. He’s kind of like a swing voter, little things may shift his opinion one way or the other.

      On the one hand, life under lockdown is stressful and psychologically wearying, for a variety of reasons, and as days go by, the pressure builds, and the desire for relief and release grows and grows. He becomes more con.

      In addition to losing fortunes and longing for a return to normal life, I think the psychological impact has been mostly ignored in the shadow of the gargantuan tragedy of all those deaths and physical traumas.

      But that’s kind of a mistake, because we need to be trying extra hard to cut each other plenty of slack in times like this, and we won’t if we lose sight of how stressed, edgy, obsessive, and anxious this is making everyone, even those who are by any material measure perfectly comfortable. There’s an emotional Minsky cycle to parallel the financial one. Yeah, it’s anecdotal, but judging from my coworkers, my guess is that at least ten percent of people have moved ten percent of the way toward nervous breakdown, and there’s a doubling rate for that too, and let’s pray it isn’t too fast. People, please try harder to be excellent to each other.

      On the other hand, quickly rising death counts are kind of terrifying, and so medium guy provisionally stays more pro, for a while.

      Which is to say that reporting about the scary rate of the rising of those death counts is performing an important social function of balancing out countervailing pressures, and influencing public opinion to support current lockdown policies.

      But when that rate falls a lot, reporting that fall means that function is no longer being performed, and the pent up – and still growing – pressures start to win the war.

      Then what happens is that a complaint avalanche will get triggered on social media, ‘arguments’ – however badly evidenced or reasons – for why it’s safe and morally compulsory to end the lockdown now – will go viral, the “preference cascade” will both reveal and establish a new common knowledge, and, well, take a good, depressing look at our current leadership class and tell me if you think one man in a hundred of them has the spine and the balls to stand up to that.

    • I notice that a lot of closures last until the first week of May. Of course, most of them originally were scheduled to end before that. But I wonder if “first week of May” will become a sort of Schelling Point, where people come to look forward to it and expect it.

  6. Dr. Kling notes that the 3DDRR=deaths(t)/deaths(t-3) is now 1.64, and states that the doubling time is now 5 days. But I get
    t_doubling = 3*ln(2)/ln(3DDRR) = 4.2 days.
    Am I missing something here? If I’m making a mistake, please correct me!

    • I didn’t use that formula. just compared the numbers for the 5th and the 1st, and the ratio was close to 2

      • Thanks for the reply. If I read it correctly, you’re using
        (Deaths on the 5th)/(Deaths on the 1st)≈2.
        But there, you’re looking at an interval of 4 days, not 5; and that’d be more consistent with my figure based on the 3DDRR.

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