1. Kling was wrong. Regarding the drop in” deaths from the virus relative to cases, Tom Chivers writes,
it’s almost certainly not because the virus has mutated or anything. “There are some things we know are definitely not true,” says Beale. “We’re convinced that the virus itself isn’t substantially different, that there’s no ‘milder form’ of the virus.” The little package of RNA in its protein-and-lipid wrapper is essentially the same now as it was at the beginning of the outbreak.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
2. Maybe the high death rate in the U.S. is not something that would have been prevented by a different President (on this issue, my view is being reinforced). Andrew Biggs writes,
U.S. policymakers also suffered under the handicap that Americans entered the Covid pandemic in much poorer health than citizens of other developed countries. For instance, over 27,000 U.S Covid deaths list diabetes as a comorbidity, accounting for 16% of total Covid-related fatalities. But what if instead of having the highest diabetes rate among rich countries the U.S. had the same rate as Australia, with less than half the U.S. level? The same holds for obesity, listed as a comorbidity in 4% of Covid cases. Forty percent of Americans are obese, the highest in the developed world and over twice the OECD average. U.S. death rates from heart disease are also higher than most European and Asian countries. Hypertension is listed as a comorbidity in 22% of Covid deaths. If Americans simply had the same health status as other high-income countries, it is likely that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.
Pointer from Bryan Caplan.
3. Timothy Taylor has links to more economics papers on the virus than anyone has time to read.
4. What if the virus had made its appearance in 1990?
–I don’t think people would have self-quarantined. We didn’t have the infrastructure for low-cost direct-to-home delivery. We didn’t have the technology to allow people to work from home.
–I don’t think we would have had lockdowns. We didn’t have a generation of people raised to believe that it was unsafe for children to play without adult supervision. Shelter-in-place orders from the government would have been too unpopular for elected leaders to contemplate.
–We would not have been promised a vaccine. No one could have announced “We already sequenced the virus genome!” as if that meant a vaccine was coming any day now.
–We would not have had all of the treatment options available today.
–Our population would have had a lower proportion of high-risk individuals–fewer elderly, obese, and diabetic individuals.
–We would not have had social media to fill our heads with statistics and model forecasts and expert pronouncements to keep the virus foremost in our minds.
In short, I suspect we would have come out about the same in terms of population death rate, maybe a little more or maybe a little less. The economic consequences would have been much less. And it would not have blown up into a national trauma. For the trauma, we can thank the fact that we now live in the Digital City.
UPDATE: after writing the foregoing, but before posting, I came across Vaclav Smil comparing the current pandemic to those in 1957 and 1968,
Why were things so different back then? Was it because we had no fear-reinforcing 24/7 cable news, no Twitter, and no incessant and instant case-and-death tickers on all our electronic screens? Or is it we ourselves who have changed, by valuing recurrent but infrequent risks differently?
I have no data to back this up, but it certainly seems like all the high profile people pushing for lockdowns are mostly unaffected by them. They already ordered everything online, their jobs are being done remote, they generally don’t have young children, they are not young 20 somethings with active social lives, etc.
I think 2020 is a time where the people who have the loudest voices are also the people who lose next to nothing from a lockdown. That wouldn’t have been the case in 1990, and I think that would make a huge difference for policy.
Here is a blog post about people that like the lockdown.
https://www.financialsamurai.com/survival-of-the-richest-why-some-support-indefinite-lockdowns/
Of course the plural of anecdotes isn’t data.
Maybe instead of a class of BoBos (Bohemian Bourgeois), we need to update to a class of ZoZos (Zoom and Bezos).
It’s here https://unherd.com/2020/09/has-covid-become-less-dangerous/
Well, I read the article- in what way were you “wrong”?
If the pandemic had hit in 1990, I think all of your suppositions would have been correct.
Also, I think Josh above is correct- the people with the loudest voices today are precisely the ones less affected by the lockdowns- they all work from home, don’t have young children, and weren’t in danger of ending up on unemployment during the first six months. A commenter over at Althouse’s blog, Laslo Spatula, described the divide as Morlocks vs Eloi.
I thought that the virus had weakened.
The virus may have weakened, it may not have. That article proves nothing- the little RNA fragment isn’t the entirety of the virus’ infectivity and lethality. There are, in fact, many different strains running around right now, we just don’t know exactly what the effect of the changes are.
This new world may be safer, being told
The dangers and diseases of the old;
For with due temper men do then forgo,
Or covet things, when they their true worth know.
There is no health; physicians say that we
At best enjoy but a neutrality.
And can there be worse sickness than to know
That we are never well, nor can be so?
-John Donne
” For the trauma, we can thank the fact that we now live in the Digital City.”
But the panic on the left has contributed to a lot of anxiety as it did in 1990 when HIV didn’t have good treatments and Oprah’s guest was telling America that 1 in 5 would be dead from AIDS by 2000. Many on the left also insisted that “everyone” was at risk when it was known that there were huge differences in contracting HIV depending on whether or not people were having penile-vaginal sex with an infected person or receptive anal sex. That vocal part of the left wasn’t interested in the biology or risks.
I’ve been surprised at how poorly informed the talking heads are in their discussions of President Trump and the virus. They are months behind and in a panic. It doesn’t help that their TV doctors come on and discuss only the worst case scenarios.
I am reminded of:
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”
–Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
I believe the likely quick recovery of President Trump, demonstrating the current state of therapeutic treatment, will shake the media narrative. People will be “woke” so to speak.
One would hope his quick recovery, given his age and weight, would be a strong signal not to get so worried about this thing.
The Governor of Virginia got it and as asymptomatic. You would hope that would make him less worried about the whole thing but I haven’t seen any policy changes in the lockdown.
I think we have the vaccines and treatments necessary to get this thing in acceptable limits but it’s being held back from us under the guise of science and compassion but more likely in a bid for power.
You were for the lockdowns before you were against them.
Welcome back to reality.
Even a silly MAGA conservative like me could navigate to the stats on the CDC website (among others) back in March. Not that complicated to decipher descriptive stats.
“But, Hans you don’t understand! Hand spreading! Blah blah blah!” Did you not any hand sanitizer?
Congrats.
I still think it was pretty reasonable to be worried back in March. Who knows if your objection was well founded or reflexive. I had to fight with my Dad not to go to choir practice at the beginning of this thing, he was against the lockdown before he was for it, on instinct rather than reason.
“Did you not any hand sanitizer?”
In March….no actually. I couldn’t find any. I also couldn’t find bread or milk for a little while either.
Beyond that I remember trying to disinfect everything I touched back in March, not sustainable, and definitely one wouldn’t be able to go anywhere or do anything is surfaces were a problem.
One country had gotten it really bad, China, and they had declared marshal law. Another was in the process of getting it very bad, Italy, and it seemed like a complete apocalypse over there (overwhelmed hospitals and sky high death rates at the time). All the infections graphs looked like an exponential curve with no limit.
The only regret I have is that I believe we lived in a *society* where we could do the lockdown, evaluated the evidence, and then end the lockdown if the evidence said so. Such a society would have ended the lockdown by the summer and would have sent kids back to school this fall. We don’t live in a society. We live in a barbarous realm that once that power was handed over to gatekeepers they would never give it up and mass media would be an effective control over both public compliance and public opinion.
I suppose we could have prevented this scenario by never allowing the lockdown, and taken the (reasonably high at the time) risk of mass death and destruction. In retrospect maybe that was the right call, I’ve updated my priors about being more pessimistic and more hostile to the garbage society I live in and the people in it. I plan to be even more dour in the future based on this experience.
Everyone knows about the “demographic transition”: For most of human history, people had a justified fear that some of their children would not survive to adulthood. So in order to increase the odds that they would have surviving offspring, they had three or four or five or more. This was social custom, what just about everyone did. But the chances that children will die is now close to zero and social norms have changed–though with a lag. People now have one or two or three.
I suspect we have undergone a health transition. We now assume that we will not die from treatable illness. We may be on various drugs, 80 pounds overweight, using oxygen tanks and maybe a wheelchair but we ain’t gonna die. The idea that something new can come along and kill us shatters the world as we have come to experience it. So we will do whatever seems necessary to get that world back. Loss aversion is real.
“4. What if the virus had made its appearance in 1990?”
That article was already written back in MARCH, when ASK was probably still a lockdown libertarian.
“When the coronavirus finally runs its course, one of the most important tasks for health-care officials will be to determine whether the preventive measures we’re taking today were effective. Did deploying the National Guard save lives, or did it simply expose the soldiers to an infection that, in the end, could not be stopped? Did we pay too high a price for tanking our economy and disrupting our society?
Or did we get it right, acting quickly and decisively to slow the virus, shutting down possible pathways of infection? By comparing the 2020 data with information from 1957, we’ll also be able to find out if the strange people who lived in that distant year—and I remember them well—could have done more to reduce the death toll of the Asian flu. The more answers we get, and the sooner we get them, the better it will be for everyone. When the curtain goes up on Broadway again, somewhere in a faraway continent to be named later, we can be sure that new viruses will be waiting in the wings.”
https://www.city-journal.org/1957-asian-flu-pandemic
“4. What if the virus had made its appearance in 1990?”
Related comments from ASK on a nearly identical question from back in April:
My link will get blocked, but see post dated April 10.
ASK comes out looking ok, but not great. For sure there is some backsliding going on. Fortunately, no more mention of the military style lockdowns that he was so fond of a few weeks earlier.
And, let us not forget, ASK was for lockdowns long before he was against them. And, he never came to the defense of Georgia, Florida, Texas, et. al when they started opening up.
But unlike other sites (hint: Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project), ASK runs a class organization that won’t surreptitiously revise past posts or text. Kudos to him for his intellectual honesty.
You are being very unfair to Kling here.
Any evidence for this? Did he not advocate for military style lockdowns? I would post the links, but they are banned.
And, did he ever come to the defense of various states that decided to take a different approach? Do you not remember how vilified Georgia was? Crickets from ASK.
Let’s be honest here.
Is this the part where the ASK OnlyFans come to his defense? Please provide the links…
Basically, as much as you might try, you aren’t going to be able to jump on the shoulders of those that had the courage to try something different. If you don’t have the cojones than you don’t get any of the credit. Sorry, that’s just the way it works.
Provide links of what? What link could prove a negative? I’ve been reading this blog throughout the pandemic, I don’t recall him ever actually endorsing the lockdowns. He criticized throughout April (it’s easy enough to search; he wrote a post entitled “my case against lockdowns” in early April).
“he never came to the defense of Georgia, Florida, Texas”
What kind of reasoning is this? When have you ever defended the victims of the Belgian genocide in the Congo? I’ve never seen you say a word about it. Should infer that you retroactively support King Leopold?
Note that this has nothing to do with being a fan of Kling. It has to do with your penchant for writing things that aren’t true.
I don’t know what a “military style lockdown” is. In the Philippines you can get shot dead on sight for violating their lockdown. That’s a military style lockdown.
Where I am they told businesses to close, and if you defied that some guy might or might not come out and give you a ticket for a fairly nominal amount, depending.
I read some stuff about De Blasio and the peoples republic of New York acting harsher, but at least with my own eyes I never saw a soldier or cop stopping anyone from doing anything, and I’ve seen lots of people break supposed rules.
We have a mask order, but lots of people don’t wear masks anyway. I’ve never seen one stopped by a cop, or even asked by a clerk, to put one on. Lots of people do, but mostly due to social signaling, not because of some military lockdown.
Maybe it would be different if were did more indoor stuff, but I got takeout the other day and every single customer in the restaurant had no mask on, despite that supposedly being against the governors order. Nobody stopped them. Where is the gestapo?
From a government POV, the biggest issue in my mind is closing schools. A person can ignore a government mandate, but they can’t get their tax dollars back to pay for alternative schooling.
From a social POV your average person does what they are told, so gestapo or no I hate seeing them given bad advice. The other day I went to the park and there were already two pink hair looking degenerates and their kid at the playground. They were completely by themselves with a small child, and they were all wearing masks. Now I think that is dumb even if there are other people on the playground, but when nobody else is there? They are social distanced by like 1000 ft to anyone else. What are they doing? What is running through their heads? What they’ve been told I guess.
I’ve seen a lot of people suffer a lot not because the government is forcing them to obey any rules, but because having been told “these are the rules” they have fallen into line. My wife’s mother had not visited us in our new home because “there is a travel ban to other states” in her state. Its not being enforced, and even the people who issued it admit they can’t and probably shouldn’t enforce it, but huge swaths of people simply do what authorities tell them blindly, and so it matters what authorities say even if it’s unenforcbile.
I have never known a link here to be banned. If you put two in the same comment, the spam filter will grab it, and it won’t be posted until ASK approves.
Great post, end the lockdowns.
My guess is you’re right but we don’t know yet. I suspect the lockdown have delayed many infections and deaths. We don’t know yet how this will end: mass vaccinations or just ending lockdowns and accepting the consequences. If we do actually deploy a vaccine, I sure hope we wind up with fewer deaths than the historical approach (just let the virus run it’s course).
Problem is, I think it’s going to be hard to tease out just how effective the two approaches are (putting aside more nuanced approaches of, say, isolating high risk people and letting everyone else get on with their lives). Academics will be arguing about it a decade from now, long after everyone else has lost interest.
In 1990, the virus would never have made it out of China to the extent that it did (certainly not hundreds of Chinese going to Italy, the PNW, and California).
And we could have sequenced the virus in 1990 but it would have both taken longer and we wouldn’t have had anything to do with the information.
I think a big change from the scenario described in item (4) is that the information about the origins and early spread of a virus are now much better known and known much sooner by the public worldwide.
If this event had occurred in 1990, it would have been seen much more as ‘something that just happened’ than ‘China caused this.’
Back around March, I (and several others) had thought of the idea of not imposing lockdowns on the young so that they can develop herd immunity for the entire population.
I had thought of ‘the young’ as being defined as (for instance) those under age 45. Once the infection rate had dropped, then increase the end age of ‘the young’ incrementally until population-wide herd immunity was reached.
As for exceptions (like young people working in a nursing home), elderly people could each select (for instance) at most one ‘buddy’ from the young group to take care of them and that young person would be expected to follow lockdown guidelines while taking care of elderly people.
The non-young would be expected to follow lockdown guidance and, if they didn’t, (here’s the part that might not be politically feasible) they would be given last preference in medical attention if they became infected. A more feasible alternative could be to reduce the tax credit given out earlier this year to those non-young who don’t follow guidelines.