The natural slowdown in virus spread

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Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha write,

Relatively slow growth or even shrinkage of daily deaths from the disease was observed in every location that we study 20-30 days after that location first experienced 25 cumulative deaths, and the dispersion in growth rates of daily deaths across locations fell even more rapidly

They argue that the uniformity of this pattern across different locations implies that differences in lockdown policies are not important. This could be because the private responses to the pandemic are more uniform, or the network structure of social interaction leads to a rapid spread followed by a slower spared, or there is some biological factor at work. On the latter point, they cite another paper which reports that

of eight major influenza pandemics that have occurred since the early 1700’s (including the Spanish Flu of 1918-19), seven had an early peak that disappeared over the course of a few months without significant human intervention. Unfortunately, each of those seven had a second substantial peak approximately six months after the first.

I recommend the whole paper.

Meanwhile, Greg Ip writes,

Five months later, the evidence suggests lockdowns were an overly blunt and economically costly tool. They are politically difficult to keep in place for long enough to stamp out the virus. The evidence also points to alternative strategies that could slow the spread of the epidemic at much less cost. As cases flare up throughout the U.S., some experts are urging policy makers to pursue these more targeted restrictions and interventions rather than another crippling round of lockdowns.

My sense is that the best science says that we don’t know what works. Lockdowns are certainly the most theatrical policy, though. They allow politicians to show that they care. They are the equivalent of Hansonian medicine.

Note how well what I thought were outlandish predictions three months ago are holding up.

30 thoughts on “The natural slowdown in virus spread”

  1. The Atkeson et al observations seem consistent with the recent CDC disclosure that less than 10,000 deaths have been recorded with the virus as the sole cause, and, with the “dry tinder” theory. Could the initial spike in deaths reflect a missing factor we could call V for high vulnerability?

    If so, Ip’s suggestion that broad shutdowns are not optimal , (I think an ungated version is available at: https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/new-thinking-on-covid-lockdowns-theyre-overly-blunt-and-costly. )
    seems appropriate but instead of hand wringing over testing/mask wearing woulda, coulda, shoulda, the better response would be:

    (1) Better protect the highly vulnerable with better ventilation and UVC air sanitizing;
    (2) limiting exposure to and attacking transmission potential in closed spaces, crowded spaces, and close-contact settings;
    (3) isolation of infected nursing home residents in separate facilities;
    (4) greater support for isolation outside the family home;
    (5) addressing factors that may increase vulnerability such as vitAmin D and zinc deficiency. Supplements are cheap and have very limited side effects; and,
    (6) early pharmaceutical intervention with any of the many low-side effect pharmaceuticals that might prevent advancement to a more vulnerable state. The FDA recently cleared favipiravir (widely used in Japan under the brand name Avigan) for use in high risk facilities:

    https://www.contagionlive.com/news/fda-clears-favipiravir-covid19-facility-outbreak-prevention-study

    But this doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention. Maybe some measuring and reporting on its use would accelerate adoption?

  2. Some of your predictions are good, but we certainly haven’t given up on a vaccine; also, I haven’t heard anything about vitamin D lately. It’s premature to evaluate some of them, such as that people will come to view summer as “safe season,” winter as “unsafe.”

  3. I will say that right now, there two locations we should watch- New York City and Sweden. Both will enter the Fall/Winter at about the same time, and both can reasonably be hypothesized to have reached herd immunity, at least with the population with a still robust immune system. Does either state see a spike in new cases anywhere close to the one each saw this Spring? How does the CFR of this new wave compare to the one from this Spring?

  4. An open letter to all the of the high IQ over educated people on this blog (and elsewhere):

    Please stop over analyzing the virus with your silly models and quasi scientific analysis. The amount of ink spilled and intellectual horse power applied to this thing has been phenomenal (congratulations!). But, you continually fail to enlighten us average folks with anything remotely predictive or non obvious.

    BTW and many apologies for this – the basic truths about this virus have been known from nearly the very beginning and have continued to hold true to the present.

    • Bob, please could you detail the basic truths we knew at the beginning (December 2019 or March 2020?) and the evidence supporting them. Then, if you think we have learned anything since the beginning, please detail the good and bad news and the evidence. That would be very useful for my ongoing research about what has been happening in Chile.

      • Sure, no problem. Here is what we’ve known since at least 03/2020 and has been re-confirmed month-by-month thereafter:

        1) > 65 and/or have pre-existing conditions, this thing is deadly.

        2) all others, nothing much to see here.

        3) ethical considerations are outside the reach of science (unless you’re a Randian or similar person that doesn’t believe in the is-ought gap).

        In terms of Chile, not sure if a country of 20 million people has anything particularly interesting or relevant to tell the rest of us.

        • In March there was legitimate worry about transmission through surfaces and other scary stuff. The only major country to encounter it at that point was China and they did super lockdown. I can forgive someone (including myself) for being more scared in March before it became apparent that surfaces and outdoors were basically safe.

        • Thanks to everyone for his/her replies and advice.

          While I’m partial to red dots (in particular, the Sig Romeo 5), I ultimately decided on a Vortex scope. Our young daughter will have more fun with a long range scope vs. tactical red dot, at least for the next few years.

          An awesome setup and can only wish that I had something similar at her age.

  5. The lockdown is one of the most evil things I’ve seen in my lifetime. That libertarians couldn’t do much here (many like Cowen basically piled on) is an indictment.

    I will forgive people being wrong in March because the virus was potentially more deadly then it really was given the information at the time. It was also frustrating trying to get people to take the most basic precautions at first (arguing with my Dad not to go to chorus practice in March). But by summer though it was obvious lockdown was massive overreaction. I can’t forgive anyone that is pro lockdown at this point.

    The big lesson I took away from this is that the *dumb* don’t tread on me types were right. If you agree that common sense restriction should take place, then the anarcho-tyranny crowd will take all your freedoms. Better to resist on principle tooth and nail. I thought they were being stubborn but it turns out they were just being rational in an irrational world.

    • When the lockdown started in my state, I told friends it was a huge mistake because they do little to alter the course of the virus and there are going to be a ton of negative consequences that are more difficult to see, especially if you are in a stable home where you can work from and are in the upper 10% of income. We also knew in mid-March that there was no way the WHO’s 3.4% CFR was remotely correct. I thought somewhere between 0.2% and 0.7% because that is where South Korea and Germany were testing at, not Italy’s extremely high number as hospital patients seemed to be pouring in.

      You’d be surprised at how many thought I didn’t care because I was vocal against lockdowns. No, I cared, which is why I was so opposed to the colossal error. But something else bothered me a day later. I thought if we could slide into an error like this, it is probably easier than I thought to slide into a nuclear war. Granted, I’ve always been disturbed by that but these decisions heightened that concern.

      • After the mistake of admonishing the early warning of Li Wenliang on January 3, China reversed course and did the predictably authoritarian thing of a very hard lockdown. YouTube videos of the Wuhan lockdown created a meme. A viral meme about a virus is a viral viral meme. When the world saw that non-Chinese people could have a problem with the virus in northern Italy, the viral viral meme jumped from the minds of authoritarians into the minds of politicians everywhere.

        • Philippe Lemoine has a fascinating (if long) series of articles in Quillette on the early stages of the virus.

          “[Part one] looks at the circumstances surrounding the initial outbreak; Part Two looks at the discovery of human-to-human transmission and the immediate response; Part Three investigates allegations that the pandemic began in a “wet market” or that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan; Part Four examines charges that China falsified its pandemic data.”

    • David Henderson actively organized opposition to lockdowns in California. He’s a decidedly better metonymy fir libertarianism than Tyler Cowen, who is popular precisely because he is the most moderate (least libertarian) libertarian blogger (and this reaches a broader audience).

      • Just curious: If we played a little game of underrated vs. overrated among libertarians for Tyler, Alex, Megan, etc. over the last 6 months, how would they do? What makes them libertarian and what libertarian positions do they hold?

        As a hold-your-nose MAGA conservative*, I will abstain from voting on this one.

        *the orange man is most definitely a strange, horrible, no good person, but BLM, open borders, drug legalization and Kamala Harris are far worse

        • One of my favorite parts: love to see people like Megan talking about their “difficulties” in kneading dough and what not via Twitter from their cush work from home jobs. In the meantime, they lecture the unemployed/cannot work from home crowd on the (mostly non-existent) risks of the virus and why it’s not appropriate to return our* kids to school.

          What out-of-touch fools. Modern day Antoinette‘s? Let them eat Megan’s cake.

          *irony alert: many of these people have literally zero children and have no clue what its like.

  6. “The big lesson I took away from this is that the *dumb* don’t tread on me types were right.”

    Respectfully disagree. The tobacco chewing* folks like myself have no power or influence.

    So, the story is less about us folks getting it right than the ordained intellectuals and TED Talk thought leaders who got it spectacularly wrong. Their quasi scientific models are only outmatched by their hubris.

    *Copenhagen snuff is my preference.

  7. “Relatively slow growth or even shrinkage of daily deaths from the disease was observed in every location that we study 20-30 days after that location first experienced 25 cumulative deaths”

    Did they even bother to look at the southern states or cities? That’s not what happened at all in Houston, for instance, where death rates grew about three months after the 25th cumulative death.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=houston+covid+deaths&oq=houston+covid+deaths

    • Actually, they did:

      “Panama’s daily deaths were nearly flat for several weeks and then began to
      rise, a similar pattern to that observed in some U.S. states like Texas and Florida.”

      They just didn’t make a plot of those. But certainly goes against their “stylized” fact.

      • Actually, they don’t go against the stylized fact. You are forgetting that Texas and Florida never had the high growth rate in daily deaths in July and August that New York had in March- in both of those states, the really high growth rates were in March and April, just like New York (but much lower than New York’s), but the peaks didn’t occur until the second wave in July/August. Indeed, Florida and Texas’ plots would look very similar to Panama’s corrected for population.

        I think where you are getting confused is not thinking through what is meant by rate of growth here. In New York, daily deaths went from 1 death/day on March 14th to 764 (7 Day Averages) on April 14th- a period of 31 days. Florida went from one death/day on March 16th to 61 on May 8th- a period of 53 days. For Texas, it was from 1 on March 19th to 38 at the initial peak on May 15th, a period of 47 days.

        In the secondary wave, like the Panama graph they did produce in the paper, Florida went from the low point of deaths/day of 30 on June 1st to just 182 on August 16th, up by a factor of 6 in a period of 77 days. In Texas, the low point was 17 on May 30th, and the new peak in the second wave was on August 17th at 221 deaths/day, up by a factor of 13 in a period of 79 days. In both cases, the growth rates of the second wave were much lower than either state experienced during the March/May period, and are quite similar to the growth rates in Panana in the second wave.

        • Just to add to this: both my home state of Texas and Florida survived the uptick without any significant government imposed lockdowns.

          We enjoyed a great trip to Disney World (FL) in August. In the meantime, Disneyland (CA) remains closed as of today as does a lot of the state of California. Has California done any better with their different approach?

  9. “Lockdowns are certainly the most theatrical policy, though. They allow politicians to show that they care. ”

    True, but at some point the far larger number of life-years lost to the shutdown than the virus will be revealed. They’ve reduced the tax base by a significant amount with all the small businesses they’ve killed. And either the politicians “that cared” have to jack up taxes or they are going to have to cut back government services. If they raise taxes, the economic damage of the pandemic will metastasize and cause damage for decades. Those of us for smaller government could see advantage, but the cutbacks won’t be in the inefficient/useless areas of government.

    And the only way to dampen this new found rule by edict will be to severely punish those in power now, whether their edicts were founded on good policy or not. They’ve tasted the sweet liquid of fiat and like wild animals that discover humans are easy prey, the only solution it to put them down.

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