Job losses during the Great Recession of 2008-2009 were largely permanent job losses. Job losses during the Great Shutdown of 2020 are largely temporary layoffs. The future course of the economy will, of course, depend on the microbiology. But the economy seems well situated for a rapid recovery if testing, treatment, and vaccine development allows it.
This is one of those links I provide in order to give you access to opinions with which I disagree.
I disagree in part because I see no realistic scenario in which fears of the virus go away the rest of this year. But mostly I disagree about the ability to recover easily. One can imagine a society in which households and businesses could bounce back from a two-month shutdown, because they had plenty of cash reserves to ride it out. But back in the real world we encouraged a gigantic debt buildup. Over the past fifty years, we have told the financial sector that by acquiring debt from consumers and businesses, they could enjoy privatized profits and socialized risks. We have created an economy that runs very well in good times but is highly fragile otherwise. If my assessment is correct, then short-term dislocations will have long-term consequences.
2. In a difficult-to-understand paper about mutation patterns of the virus, Zhi-wei Chen and others write,
we classed the SARS-CoV-2 into four main groups and 10 subgroups based on different mutation patterns for the first time. The distribution of the 10 subgroups was varied in geography, time and age, but not in gender. After two apparent expansion stages, most of groups are rapidly expanding, especially group D. Therefore, we should pay attention to these genetic diversity patterns of SARS-CoV-2 and take more targeted measures to control its spread
Pointer of course from John Alcorn.
3. Michelle Barton and others write,
Children accounted for 1.9% of confirmed cases. The true incidence of pediatric infection and disease will only be known once testing is expanded to individuals with less severe or no symptoms. Admission rates vary from 0.3 to 10% of confirmed cases (presumably varying with the threshold for testing) with about 7% of admitted children requiring ICU care. Death is rare in middle and high income countries..
Another Alcorn pointer.
There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses, especially respiratory ones, including the common cold. Vitamin D increases the production of antiviral proteins and decreases cytokines, the immune molecules that can cause a “storm” of dangerous inflammation. It has long been suspected that most people’s low vitamin D levels in late winter partly explain the seasonal peaking of flu epidemics, and rising vitamin D levels in spring partly explain their sudden ending. Vitamin D is made by ultraviolet light falling on the skin, so many people in northern climates have a deficiency by the end of winter. Eating fish and eggs helps, but it is hard to get enough of it in the diet.
Here is a list of people who are more likely to be vitamin D deficient than the average: dark-skinned people (pigment blocks sunlight); obese people (the vitamin gets sequestered in fat cells); type-2 diabetics (vitamin D improves the body’s sensitivity to insulin); the elderly (they tend to avoid the sun and eat more frugally); city dwellers (they see less sunlight). Does that list ring any bells? All appear to be more likely to hospitalised with severe cases of Covid-19.
I have suspected that an outdoor lifestyle is protective against the virus.
But I can’t believe that Ridley would bring up skin color. Another Alcorn pointer leads to Gregorio Millett and others, who write,
Social conditions, structural racism, and other factors elevate risk for COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths in black communities.
So there. Vitamin D has nothing to do with it.
5. Another Matt Ridley insight.
If COVID-19 is at least partly a ‘nosocomial’ (hospital-acquired) disease, then the pandemic might burn itself out quicker than expected. The death rate here peaked on April 8, just two weeks after lockdown began, which is surprisingly early given that it is usually at least four weeks after infection that people die if they die. But it makes sense if this was the fading of the initial, hospital-acquired wave.
His thinking is that if frail people in February and March were going to hospitals for any reason, they might have picked up the virus.
Re: hospital-acquired illness, in Massachusetts we have been averaging upwards of 60% of deaths coming from long-term care facilities for at least a few weeks now. To the extent that other states are providing this data consistently, it seems to be a common theme, though it’s hit here particularly hard.
While Covid cases are fairly evenly distributed across the population, hospitalization and death are both very age-driven. So far, ~95% of our deaths are 60+ years old, with the average at 82 years.
Re: No. 1. Greg Mankiw’s prediction, that there will be a V-shaped recovery, is surprising. The only ‘economic’ worry that he mentions is that ‘the employment rate’ has dropped several points to approx. 60%. Of course, he does make rapid recovery conditional on introduction of effective testing and development of effective treatments or a vaccine. Are any of the three around the corner in the USA? The more time passes, the more difficult it will be to restore previous employment matches. I hope that Prof. Mankiw will expound on his reasons for optimism.
Re: No. 2. If I understand correctly, the authors find that (a) there are several strains of the virus and (b) each major region of the globe has a preponderance of a different strain. Have I misundertood?
Quick recovery assumes virus effects pass relatively shortly.
I don’t feel in a position to opine about that.
(5) John Ioannidis wrote a piece in JAMA about hospitals as a major point of transmission in Italy and NY a month ago… (remember in the early stages everyone with a sore throat or fever was frightened silly and rushing to crowd the hospitals)
“What Other Countries Can Learn From Italy During the COVID-19 Pandemic”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2764369
Re #4 — Matt’s hypothesis is entirely consistent with what we see in the results of the OpenSAFELY paper analyzing NHS data. The only factor Matt mentions that they don’t analyze is urban/rural.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1.full.pdf
The specification may not be Arnold’s personal favorite (at least he is hankering for a few others), but it is the multiple regression we have been yearning for, taking account of age, sex, race, co-morbidities, and a bunch of other stuff simultaneously. The visual on page 12 (actually, pdf page 12, paper page 11) of the paper tells the story: NOTHING is as important as age. Being old is really dangerous in the corona-infested world. Suspicions that old people were dying only because there is more stuff wrong with them should be put to rest in light of these findings. Dark skin is a disadvantage, but not as much as being male. People with dark skin are more likely to die of corona even after taking account of income and co-morbidities, including obesity, although obesity by itself increases risk. Being diabetic is worse than having asthma. For a respiratory illness!
This is essentially a regression of a dummy (for all in the people in data –17 million of them — as of Feb 1, 2020, = 1 if dead of corona by April 25, 2020) on dummies (age and income are broken into categories, not used as a number) although the health/medical people don’t call it that.
(Amazing how balkanized technical vocabulary is — we say Type I and Type 2, the drug people say Specificity and Sensitivity, and neither dichotomy gives anyone any help in remembering which is which.)
King Country WA (Seattle metro) DOH is reporting that 63.5% of all covid-19 deaths in the country are associated with being (a) a resident, (b) a staff member, (c) a visitor – to a nursing home, assisted living facility, or adult family home.
So it’s not just the residents, it’s the people around them.
There was apparently an effect where a staffer might work at multiple facilities – so some kind of therapist, say, might get an infection one place and then unwittingly carry it to another.
There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses,
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Vitamin D delivers food from the skin to the interior. What is the equilibrium condition? The equilibrium is reached when vtamin D delivers just enough food to the white cell system at the skin barrier. At that point the white cells will not eat your skin. It is a basic principle of maintaining the exterior, interior boundary and has been around almost as long as cells. A fundamental evolutionary breakthrough.
What about UV? The stable organism moves to environment where the UV kills off just enough external biomass to meet the condition. This explains a good deal about the development of living organisms.
There are about 130 million households in the US.
The US confiscate $1.3 trillion from taxpayers every year to pay for a global guard service for multinationals; the DoD, DHS, VA, black budget, and pro-rated interest on the national debt.
So, that’s about $10,000 per household.
Proposal: The US government give the money back that they confidcated, at $10k for household. Yes, some do-goody redistribution going on there, but a pandemic calls for quick-and-dirty action.
Let the US borrow the $1.3 trillion, and if necessary, monetize it through QE.
And end the lockdowns immediately, completely.
An economic bounceback? Restaurants and bars cater to younger people, and they are not so fearful (see Florida). Maybe so, especially if every household had $10k to spend.
One simple grouping would be to look at effect of income within give race/demographic. If you see that within given race/demographic, there is no impact of income, that would more strongly support the notion that it could be some physiologic factor, perhaps vitamin D. If you still see income as a big factor, I’d be likelier to point to pre-existing conditions (to the extent that those correlate with lower income), living situation, and or poor adherence to social distancing.
Kling talked about 84,000 U.S. deaths by June/July, and I didn’t think possible. I knew the power of an increase in deaths by 1% late into this phase but will be wrong. My eyeball curve fitting uses CDC known deaths so at 68,000.
In a normal non-Covid year, about 2.5 million Americans die of all causes.
The way things are going, we may have 200,000 deaths from Covid by the fall.
For the moment, I will assume that there is honest counting, i.e. we are not stretching the number of Covid deaths due to incentives from Medicare, from state health departments, etc.
It is depressing to me how much economic pain we are enduring from this ten per cent bump. Of course, some models were predicting two million extra deaths, and governors had to listen to these models, didn’t they?
It is much closer to 3 million deaths/year.
I have no idea whether vitamin D is actually effective. It’s plausible, but a lot of similarly plausible things are BS. I’d give it a 30% chance of working (wild guess).
On the other hand, vitamin D is cheap and safe at “Eskimo doses”*. A few cents a day for a 30% chance of working looks like a good deal.
* The traditional Inuit diet is extremely high in vitamin D, over 10x the US RDA. This is how people who live in the Arctic survive with brown skin.
re: The Vitamin D Paradox
By the current blood test for vitamin D, most African-Americans are deficient. That can lead to weak bones. So many doctors prescribe supplement pills to bring their levels up.
But the problem is with the test, not the patients, according to a new study. The vast majority of African-Americans have plenty of the form of vitamin D that counts — the type their cells can readily use.
The research resolves a long-standing paradox.
“The population in the United States with the best bone health happens to be the African-American population,” says Dr. Ravi Thadhani, a professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study. “But almost 80 percent of these individuals are defined as having vitamin D deficiency. This was perplexing.”
The origin of this paradox is a fascinating tale of genes interacting with geography. More on that later.
To unravel the mystery, Thadhani and his colleagues looked closely at various forms of vitamin D in the blood of 2,085 Baltimore residents, black and white. They focused on a form of the vitamin called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which makes up most of the vitamin circulating in the blood. It’s the form that the standard test measures.
The 25-hydroxy form is tightly bound to a protein, and as a result, bone cells, immune cells and other tissues that need vitamin D can’t take it up. It has to be converted by the kidneys into a form called 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D.
For Caucasians, blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D are a pretty good proxy for how much of the bioavailable vitamin they have. But not for blacks.
That’s because blacks have only a quarter to a third as much of the binding protein, Thadhani says. So the blood test for the 25-hydroxy form is misleading. His study finds that because of those lower levels of the protein, blacks still have enough of the bioavailable vitamin, which explains why their bones look strong even though the usual blood tests say they shouldn’t.
“The conclusion from this study is that just because your total levels are low, it doesn’t mean we need to replace vitamin D” using supplements, Thadhani says. The study was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/20/246393329/how-a-vitamin-d-test-misdiagnosed-african-americans