1. Expressions I wish people would stop using.
Re-open the economy. It is not a binary open/close situation. Some economic activity is taking place now. Much of the economic activity that was prevalent pre-crisis will never return. And most of all, no signal from a government official is going to enable “back to normal.” This isn’t like the games of tag we played when I was 6 years old. There is no “All-ee All-ee Infree.”
Stimulus. The government is reallocating capital and redistributing wealth. For better or worse, the Fed is telling banks where to lend and where not to lend. The point of giving people relief checks now is not to “stimulate” them to go back to eating in restaurants, attending conferences, flying overseas, or going to sporting events. If they don’t spend on anything other then rent, utilities, and groceries, that’s fine.
2. Worst-legislation-in-history watch:
Congress did not include relief for the mortgage industry in its $2 trillion rescue package — even as lawmakers required mortgage companies to allow homeowners up to a year’s delay in making payments on federally backed loans.
Sounds like Wesley Mouch wrote the CARES act.
3. James Stock and others write,
what is the share of infections that are undetected under current testing guidelines? To answer this question, we turn
to COVID-19 testing data from Iceland. . . Our primary estimates for the fraction of infections that are undetected range from 88.7% to 93.6%.
But is the trend in the U.S. for testing criteria to be tighter or looser? Some anecdotes suggest looser–that is, when someone calls in with symptoms, they are told that as long as symptoms are mild to stay home and not come in for a test. If that means that we are testing a smaller sample of the symptomatic, then the number of reported cases understates the number of people with the virus by even more than the above estimate would suggest.
4. Jeremy Stein and others write,
Under our plan, the government would provide payment assistance to enable impacted businesses to meet their recurring fixed obligations—including interest, rent, lease, and utility payments—during the health emergency. A key advantage of our plan is that it can be easily implemented and administered. Firms would apply for grants up to a maximum limit determined by their recurring fixed obligations, measured using items on the front page of the firm’s 2019 corporate tax return. Both to protect taxpayers and for reasons of fairness, firms—especially the largest firms—that receive temporary BCI assistance would be required to gradually repay most of these benefits over time. Large firms that receive assistance would also face temporary restrictions on their ability to pay dividends and repurchase shares, as well as limitations on executive compensation.
Note that the phrase “would be required to gradually repay most of these benefits” more like a compbination of a grant and a loan than like a pure grant. This is sort of like my credit-line idea, only more complicated. And even slightly more complicated means creating painful difficulties with implementation. People don’t seem to anticipate the way that as you try to improve an idea on paper you can make it seriously degrade in practice. As in the the worst legislation in history.
5. Some people are insinuating that virus deaths are over-reported. I will not consider this a serious issue until I see more evidence.
Of course “cause of death” is not a black-and-white issue. Someone could be diagnosed with congestive heart failure in February and be counted as a virus death in March. But in another case, the person who signs the death certificate could refuse to report a death as virus death only because the person was not tested the virus. If the CDC has issued guidance against making the latter reporting error, then I see that as sensible advice, not a conspiracy to inflate the numbers.
For a variety of reasons, the category “underlying conditions” is too broad. If nothing else, it would help to differentiate underlying conditions that typically lead to death within 6 months from other underlying conditions. i would only want to revise downward the estimate of virus deaths to the extent that more than, say, 5 percent are in people who had less than 6 months to live, anyway.
“Re-open the economy. It is not a binary open/close situation. Some economic activity is taking place now. Much of the economic activity that was prevalent pre-crisis will never return. And most of all, no signal from a government official is going to enable ‘back to normal.’”
1) Not sure who is saying or implying that it’s a simple binary issue. Strawman argument?
2) government signals may appear more powerful than you suggest. My evidence: the number of masks I see among supermarket customers after the government changed its policy vs. before.
3) do marginal changes not matter here? How much does herd mentality and changing it come into play?
4) if a significant portion of the economy will be semi permanently offline, what are your policies to address this? Note: short term lines of credit probably won’t be adequate
3) do marginal changes not matter here? How much does herd mentality and changing it come into play?
As an example: last week, I felt totally fine and normal going to the supermarket without gloves or a mask. This week, I feel like a weirdo outcast without them. That’s a HUGE change in one week, which I credit to herd mentality and a swift change in government policy.
I have watched a number of really smart people proclaim “test, test, test” and “trace, trace, trace” as some sort of magic formula for stopping this. They are doing even today despite the fact that there isn’t enough manpower on the planet to trace such numbers of people and their contacts. It is one of those things that only works at the very beginning when the number of infected aren’t over 1000.
Here is the practical problem- most people won’t submit for a test, even if they are sick, if isn’t mandatory, and in the western world, it isn’t mandatory. The testing, since it has always been a scarce resource and still is today, should have been reserved solely for healthcare workers and their immediate family members, and the patients in hospitals and nursing homes- and in the latter case, for the people who have relatives in such places.
Now, a cheap and widely available anti-body test will be a big weapon in the on-going battle. It is important to people to understand their own risk since it is all but certain that 90% or more of the infected are in a basket called “Unknown”.
Much of the economic activity that was prevalent pre-crisis will never return. And most of all, no signal from a government official is going to enable “back to normal.”—ASK
I disagree with ASK on this one and I hope I’m right. I sure hope the restaurants and bars are packed at some near date in the future and that the cruise ship industry recovers.
I like flying on airplanes ( well, at least the convenience of it relative to the auctions). I enjoy ball games, concerts, and wish I could attend more.
I think in fact the government could facilitate a recovery by issuing an “all-clear” signal but advising high-risk individuals to take precautions.
The problem is we are in the early stages of a public health care sector’s equivalent of Vietnam. If you are old enough, you remember a stage of that war when policymakers knew it could not be won on any terms that made sense, but we could not admit a catastrophic error had been made.
The Ugly Truth, “Oh, we killed a lot of people but now we’re going to pull out,” could not be spoken.
Who today can say, “Sorry, we wrecked the economy for a lost cause.”
A couple generations ago a lot of very smart people were somehow stampeded into supporting the Vietnam War, at least initially. The COVID-19 War has some parallels.
This was the New York Times: “The United States currently has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators, but could need up to a million machines over the course of the outbreak, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine.”
So we have some metrics to work with.
By how many magnitudes did the Times get it wrong? By what factor did NBC and CNN and the rest get their predictions wrong?
The IHME came up with a number of 262,092 hospital beds one week. A week later, their revised number was 95,202. They were talking about 31,082 ventilators one week and 16,524 a week later.
These are all useful metrics in the Global War on Rona. How big a discount do we need to make when Chuck Todd delivers each night’s Five O’Clock Follies?
My cynical self thinks that even ASK is missing the key point of the current response – they’re not really about political position (though that’s a real thing), nor morality for people who are being badly suppressed through no fault of their own (though that’s a real thing.)
Some flavor of relief spending is absolutely required for two reasons:
1. To avoid social disorder on the scale of civil war.
2. To make isolation sustainable, so whatever effect it has can be sustained.
Borrowing from the future, transferring wealth, fears of inflation, are all real things, with real impacts on the debate. But they’re not the core issue.
Telling what is closing on 25% of the population they are forcibly unemployed, for the good of public health, simply cannot work without large transfers to the people affected. Otherwise simple hunger will drive them to defeat the system – to create a whole informal economy, just to survive. (This is quite common in Africa and I presume other parts of the developing world.) They won’t all just give up and become homeless people. And if even if they did, that’s still enough to defeat isolation as a public health measure.
Further, given that the economic claim of many of those suppressed is based on short term labor – they are waiters, theater people, small business owners – the idea of “loans” that can be “paid back” is a fraud. Government has zeroed out their output, perishable output that can never be reclaimed. Government thinking it will be repaid on loans meant to fill in for this loss of production is silly.
(To be fair unemployment is just flat money, not a debt.)
A simpler systemw ould be to say “your business closed by order of government? Here’s 85% of your revenues until the crises is over, so long as you keep paying people.”
As for overcounting of deaths – a FAR more likely cirumstance is that they are UNDERCOUNTED. People who die in nursing homes, die at home, die with other diseases that would not have killed them now (perhaps for years) were it not for covid-19. There are more deaths than we know (basically everywhere) and more infected than we know (basically everywhere.)
The government needs to step up the game. Taiwan (pop 24mil), has less than 300 active cases as of right now. Schools and businesses are open. Why not do what they are doing and life can be mostly normal with additional friction of masks/testing?
StimuLOSS® has a nice ring to it.
“Some people are insinuating that virus deaths are over-reported.”
I find it frustrating that people keep making such arguments, even though they’re immediately refuted by a simple look at the total (all-cause) mortality rates in recent weeks in the worst-affected areas (particularly in Italy, Spain, France, and now also New York).
In fact, I find it even more frustrating that these numbers are given so little prominence in public discourse, when in fact they are by far the clearest evidence of the true severity of the problem. (Certainly compared to the noisy, incomplete, and endlessly debatable figures based on tested and hospitalized people.) One simply cannot explain away the simple fact that wherever the disease struck hard, the total number of people dying has been vastly higher than in any comparable time period in modern history.
If the mainstream estimates of COVID-19 mortality were grossly exaggerated, it would be impossible for the disease to cause an enormous spike in all-cause mortality rates, as it has been happening in all places with a large outbreak. Indeed, what these numbers prove is that at least in such places, the official death toll is significantly underestimated:
https://towardsdatascience.com/covid-19-excess-mortality-figures-in-italy-d9640f411691
Agreed. That this virus is especially dangerous and capable of causing a lot more deaths than what is usual from ordinary colds is indeed beyond obvious from a casual glance of the death rate comparisons in most places where it spread quickly before imposition of strict controls.
At the same time, there is no such thing as a single “mortality rate”, and the variance in rates for people with certain demographic and health profiles is truly enormous, just as the variance in one’s personal R0 is also huge, e.g., the ‘super-spreaders’.
It’s frustrating for me when people report “the” mortality rate as if it weren’t highly dependent on circumstances, and even go so far as to plug that number into models and calculations without any regard for how going through different local populations will cause big deviations from those averages, which errors then go on to be propagated – indeed compounded exponentially – which further exacerbates the already substantial problem with models in this crisis.
I think the relative lack of attention given to the facts I mentioned in my above comment is an especially disturbing indication of the horrible epistemic state of public discourse in the U.S. and the West more broadly.
In science and engineering, there are often situations where the available information is noisy, unreliable, and difficult to interpret, but there is nevertheless some especially clear signal that provides important and decisive evidence, making it possible to reach conclusions that avoid speculation and guesswork and drastically cut down the space of plausible theories. One of the main indicators of epistemic health and competence is how quickly and successfully everyone can sort out such clear signals from the background noise and agree on their implications.
In the case of debates on the actual danger of COVID-19, it’s been almost a month since we got decisive evidence on this question from the all-cause mortality rates in various Italian towns. And yet, not only do we still see a lot of people in denial, but even worse, instead of simply pointing to this clear signal, insofar as mainstream sources and authorities make any coherent arguments against such wishful thinking, they are typically based on much more dubious official testing and case-fatality data.
(For me, the current pandemic has been epistemically a perfect storm where all of my personal biases were strongly pushing me in the direction of minimizing the problem, even though I was reading various contrarians who correctly predicted its severity early on. I kept thinking that there was a significant chance that the problem was overblown until I learned about the Italian all-cause mortality spike several weeks ago. And if it wasn’t for contrarians like Greg Cochran, who focused on this signal with laser-like accuracy, it would have taken me much longer to learn about it just by following mainstream sources — which were publishing optimistic wishful-thinking pieces even from some highly respectable people long after the Italian data had decisively buried them.)