On the macroeconomic policy response to the virus crisis. I start with the argument for having everyone cover their faces. Maybe if we did that to slow the spreading of the virus instead of hiding in our homes, we wouldn’t have such big economic problems.
Note that I compare the situation to the second World War, as does Tyler Cowen.
Yes to wearing masks. See HuffPost on the Slovak President (Prezidentka Caputova)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/president-slovakia-coronavirus-mask_l_5e78d0b5c5b62f90bc4e9cfa
This is also a big signal that the wearer is taking it seriously. My doctor wife made special masks for our family, but her sister’s family. A lovely blue. I saw her sister & husband shopping today, while I and my daughter were shopping, and ALL the shoppers had masks. Our four blue masks were on the distinctive colorful nice looking side.
Washing your hands might be even more important, but I’m sure wearing the masks hugely increases washing of the hands, every time we come back inside from being outside. It’s also smart to greatly reduce time spent outside, but we still go for an afternoon walk in the nearby forest after coffee after lunch. With masks. That we wear when see somebody, but often take off if nobody else is in sight; one of the reasons to go into the forest. All the other walkers had masks, tho there were a couple of runners who did not. It’s on the verge of being illegal to be outside without a mask – it’s a proposed law but the “new gov’t” isn’t yet fully settled, nor is the new key lawmaker, the Prime Minister.
Slovakia will be making more ventilators as fast as the Slovak company can do it, and is not yet seeing many more patients in hospitals – but is also not sending any of its $35,000 machines to Italy. Not yet. How many ventilators per hospital, and how many hospitals & hospital beds are also interesting metrics that, later, will be studied along with the death rates.
One 84 year old Slovak woman died of a heart attack, who had tested positive. The virus was not listed as the primary cause, in that case. How deaths are recorded will be very interesting this year — and certain to be highly studied.
EU globalist elite complaints about nationalism, and borders, will be increasingly ignored for a few years – borders matter.
America: 4++ weeks until peak (April 22), hints at part of an effective Strategy
I’m looking for four signals:
1. Grand Strategy – Flatten the Curve (score: YES)
2. Strategy – Monitor, Isolate, Trace (score: PARTIAL)
3. Tactics to support strategy (score: NO)
4. Tactic Adoption: (score: NO)
GOOD NEWS: in yesterday’s Press Briefing, Dr. Deborah Birx said:
This is the first sign that the epidemiology is starting to have an influence on strategy.
BAD NEWS:
The 14 Day Hot-Spot Traveller Quarantine will have zero impact on today’s new 4-Week-Exponential-War. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have scattered without any tracing capability being in place. Each New Yorker on the run represents a new potential disease vector.
The second problem pertains to signal 4. Tactic Adoption. Of those New Yorkers on the run, how many received Dr. Birx’s instructions, how many understood how to follow the instructions, and how many are faithfully following her instructions? When people are stressed and near panic, how to reach them and instruct them becomes a challenge.
The third problem is that the 14-day Watchful-Isolation is probably the wrong tactic for New York City today. It continues to be the right tactic for Canada but it is a weak approximation of the key tactic needed: Self-Monitoring with immediate Self-Isolation at the onset of symptoms of respiratory illness.
Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke next:
The incubation period is 1 to 14 days (thus the 14-day quarantine period) with an average of 5 days. Contact tracing, for a single individual for the last 14 days before the onset of symptoms, is a daunting challenge. Doing it for hundreds or thousands simultaneously is a challenge of both scale and timeliness. Like Testing, Tracing has to be completed in 24 hours to be effective. I really think Self-Tracing should be practiced by everyone in order to quickly give the official Contact Tracers a head start. I don’t know if this should be a bottom-up effort or a top-down one.
Post WWII… well, we can hope, but before the end of WWii fiscal stimulus might gently be called somewhat robust. For several years.
And people were forward-looking, to spending their savings. Getting married in shacking up in cheap housing.
And the US Fed was not independent (!).
The US was running export surpluses and interest rates were held fixed and Llow by an agreement between the Treasury and the Fed.
We can hope for a replay, but…
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