Category Archives: virus crisis

General update, May 9

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1. Erin Bromage writes,

We know most people get infected in their own home. A household member contracts the virus in the community and brings it into the house where sustained contact between household members leads to infection.

But where are people contracting the infection in the community? I regularly hear people worrying about grocery stores, bike rides, inconsiderate runners who are not wearing masks…. are these places of concern? Well, not really. Let me explain.

In order to get infected you need to get exposed to an infectious dose of the virus; the estimate is that you need about ~1000 SARS-CoV2 viral particles for an infection to take hold, but this still needs to be determined experimentally. That could be 1000 viral particles you receive in one breath or from one eye-rub, or 100 viral particles inhaled with each breath over 10 breaths, or 10 viral particles with 100 breaths. Each of these situations can lead to an infection.

2. Here is the paper on vitamin D.

we show that the risk of severe COVID-19 cases among patients with severe Vit D deficiency is 17.3% while the equivalent figure for patients with normal Vit D levels is 14.6%

3. Annette Alstadsæter and others write,

First, layoffs started in sectors of the economy directly affected by the policy measures but then quickly spilled over to the rest of the economy so that after 4 weeks 2/3 of layoffs are accounted for by businesses that were not directly targeted. Second, close to 90% of layoffs are temporary rather than permanent and while this classification may change as the crisis progresses, that is one glimmer of hope in the data. Third, while permanent layoffs are a minority, they still correspond to a 1.5 percentage point increase in unemployment — an unprecedented monthly change. Fourth, the layoffs have a strong socio-economic gradient and hit financially vulnerable populations. Fifth, there are hints of the important role of childcare—within firms, layoffs appear to be skewed toward workers with younger children, in particular toward women. Finally, layoffs are more common in less productive and financially weaker firms so that the employment loss may be overstating total output loss

Pointer from John Alcorn.

4. David Beckworth writes,

This existing demand for safe assets is one reason why interest rates on long-term U.S. treasury bonds remain very low despite the large runup in public debt this year. It also helps explain low inflation, since the increased demand for safe assets means less spending. A new generation of more risk-averse investors will add to this already elevated demand for safe assets and create additional disinflationary pressure that will be with us for some time.

…The use and expansion of the Fed facilities to backstop markets sends another strong signal to foreign investors that the U.S. financial system will not fail. This will encourage them to hold more dollar-denominated assets issued in America. Put differently, the biggest kid on the financial block just got stronger.

This is another case of linking to a point of view with which I disagree. Vehemently.

The demand for low-interest U.S. paper is sufficient for now. But as Herbert Stein said, things that can’t go on forever stop. And in this case, the stop will be sudden and will catch markets by surprise. It will surprise David Beckworth and others who think it can go on forever.

Also, contrary to Beckworth and others, I believe that the additional issuance of government paper does nothing to solve the main problem for the economy, which is to discover new patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.

5. For speculation on the outlook that is closer to mine, consider a paper by Victoria Gregory and others.

We find that the recession has an L-shape. The finding is easy to explain. First, even when the cost of maintaining and reactivating a suspended employment relationship is fairly small—in the order of less than a month of the worker’s value added—the fraction of workers whose employment relationship is permanently terminated is about 35%. This is consistent with survey evidence, which finds that between 40 and 50% of the workers who have entered unemployment during the first month of the lockdown have no expectation of being recalled to their previous job (see, Adams-Prassl et al. 2020 and Bick and Blandin 2020). Second, the workers who are permanently laid-off are
disproportionately of the ”fickle” type, who need to search for several years in order to find a long-lasting job.

Pointer from JA. Note that the depiction of unemployment as a search/matching problem is not to my taste, because it makes it sound as if the job opportunities are given, rather than emerging from entrepreneurial trial and error. And simulation models are not to my taste. So I cannot endorse the methods, as much as I agree with the conclusion.

6. Leonidas Palaiodimos and others write,

Patients were classified in three groups based on the BMI: BMI<25 kg/m2, BMI 25-34 kg/m2, and BMI≥35 kg/m2 as per the most recent BMI assessment prior to or during the index admission. Severe obesity was defined as BMI≥35 kg/m2.

Pointer from JA. It might be somewhat counterintuitive, but this kind of piecewise linear specification is a more robust way of dealing with possibly nonlinear relationships than is imposing a particular nonlinear functional form, such as log or exponential. These investigators find a significant role for severe obesity along with the usual role for age.

7. Doc Searls writes,

Now, haul Arnold’s template over to The U.S. Labor Market During the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession, by Tomaz Cajner. . .

The highest employment drop, in Arts, Entertainment and Recreation, leans toward inessential + fragile. The second, in Accommodation and Food Services is more on the essential + fragile side. The lowest employment changes, from Construction on down to Utilities, all tending toward essential + robust.

8. Joseph Sternberg writes,

We all know people on social media who enjoy decrying lockdown violators and protesters as “covidiots.” Project Fear works by appealing to believers’ sense that they are smarter than their peers, better able to read the tea leaves to see the impending disaster and also better able to protect society from its more benighted members. And don’t discount the joy in the sense of moral superiority when one’s position allows one to value “lives” when one’s opponents care only about “the economy.”

Pointer from Alberto Mingardi. Fear of the virus has been transformed into Fear Of Others’ Liberty. So even though Vitamin D is protective, many people applaud the California governor for closing the beaches.

9. Finally, if Tyler can link to an A-WA music video, I can link to a video of an A-WA song with me dancing to it. I need to study the video to remember the last section before the very end.

General update, May 8

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1. Greg Mankiw writes,

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.

4. Matt Ridley writes,

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.

The new minimum wage

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Two headlines from this morning’s WSJ.

1. April Jobs Report to Show Record Unemployment.

2. Businesses Struggle to Lure Workers from Unemployment.

Remember Fight for Fifteen? It passed without a fight. The Federal supplemental unemployment benefit is $600 a week. Notice that for a 40-hour week that works out to $15 an hour. And that is on top of state unemployment benefits.

The new minimum wage is a tax on small business that in many cases more than offsets the benefits from the main form of assistance they were offered, the Paycheck Protection Program.

The CARES act is creating the world that the left wants. It certainly is not the world that I wanted.

I wanted banks to offer credit lines to individuals and businesses. Instead, lending has been nationalized and concentrated at the Fed, where the highest priority is buying Treasury debt and other priorities are the municipal bond market and corporate debt markets.

I wanted states to cut back on extravagant public sector pay, benefits, and featherbedding, because the private sector is suffering enough already. Instead, the Federal government is giving huge handouts to the states, which will ultimately be paid for by taxes and inflation that hurt the private sector.

I see a secure future for Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Government. The CARES act turns everything else into rubble.

The CARES act passed with one dissenting vote. At the time, I called it the worst legislation in history. I stand by that call.

General update, May 7

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1. Tina Lu and Ben Y. Reis write,

We found that Internet search patterns reveal a robust temporal pattern of disease progression for COVID-19: Initial symptoms of fever, dry cough, sore throat and chills are followed by shortness of breath an average of 5.22 days [95% CI 3.30-7.14] after symptom onset, matching the precise clinical course reported in the medical literature. Furthermore, we found that increases in COVID-19-symptom-related searches predict increases in reported COVID-19 cases and deaths 18.53 days [95% CI 15.98-21.08] and 22.16 days [95% CI 20.33-23.99] in advance, respectively. This is the first study to show that Internet search patterns can be used to reveal the detailed clinical course of a disease. These data can be used to track and predict the local spread of COVID-19 before widespread laboratory testing becomes available in each country, helping to guide the current public health response.

Pointer from John Alcorn.

2. In another Alcorn pointer, Elizabeth Williamson and others conducted a large cohort analysis of British patients. My sense of these studies is that we always see a very strong relationship between age and death rates and higher mortality for men than women. Which co-morbidities show up as significant varies, and I suspect this is due to the way that these tend to correlate with age. If you specify the age variable in a sophisticated, non-linear way, its explanatory power will be such that co-morbidities may not show much independent effect.

I would like to see some of these explanatory models run with no age variable at all, to see how much variation you can explain with co-morbidities alone. My guess is that such equations will explain a smaller share of the variance, but they may offer better insight into the relative importance of different co-morbidities.

Here is a press release for the study.

3. A software engineer criticizes the Imperial model.

It’s clear from reading the code that in 2014 Imperial tried to make the code use multiple CPUs to speed it up, but never made it work reliably. This sort of programming is known to be difficult and usually requires senior, experienced engineers to get good results. Results that randomly change from run to run are a common consequence of thread-safety bugs.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

4. From a correspondent:

I am a small business owner, and I see a big problem with the PPP Loans that is not discussed in the media.

PPP loan forgiveness is planned as a percentage of payroll costs over the eight weeks following loan distribution. Therefore, businesses that continue to operate, with normal payroll costs, expect to receive large loan forgiveness. However, those aren’t the businesses that need forgiveness; they have continued to operate. The businesses who need the money are shut down, don’t have any payroll costs, and will therefore receive little forgiveness.

My business has continued to operate with a modest decline in sales. On my application, I could honestly certify, “current economic uncertainty makes [the] loan request necessary to support the ongoing operations of the Applicant”; I am certainly facing plenty of uncertainty. However, I am unlikely to actually need the money.

I accepted the loan and will ask for forgiveness, because if the government is handing out free money, I am going to accept; the government takes plenty of my money without asking. While there might be a few angels who don’t apply for the PPP loan, most self-interested owners will accept forgiveness. As one of my industry colleagues said to another, “Time to PPParty!”

The solution? Make the PPP loans non-forgivable LOANS, with a long (5 years?) repayment period at 0-1% interest.

PPP was rushed out – rightly in my opinion — because of the immediate nature of the problem, but Congress has time to change the program in the six months before forgiveness and repayment start.

Nobody who already accepted loans will be hurt. They can simply repay the loan.

If PPP is changed from grants to loans, owners facing huge losses from closure can at least amortize that loss over a period of years to enable them to remain in business. Furthermore, there remains the possibility to forgive some loans in the future, after more careful analysis of actual losses incurred.

5. Tomaz Cajner and others write,

Using weekly, anonymized administrative payroll data from the largest U.S. payroll processing company, we measure the deterioration of the U.S. labor market during the first two months of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We find that U.S. private-sector employment contracted by about 22 percent between mid-February and mid-April. Businesses suspending operations—perhaps temporarily—account for a significant share of employment losses, particularly among smaller businesses. Hours worked for continuing workers fell by 4.5 percent. We highlight large differences in employment declines by industry, business size, state of residence, and demographic group. Workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution experienced a 35 percent employment decline while those in the top quintile experienced only a 9 percent decline.

Miscellaneous bitter thoughts

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1. Many people believe that it is quite moral not to pay rent. Hardly anyone believes that it is moral not to pay taxes. I think that the intuition is that taxes are fair, but rent is not fair. If I owned rental property, I would not think it fair to pay taxes to a government that tells people they do not have to pay rent.

2. Here is a nursing home in which many patients got the virus but as of the date of the story only one had died. But it is not a feel-good story, at least as far as half the country is concerned.

3. In 2009, when we had the stimulus, the models forecast that unemployment would rise to 8 percent without the stimulus. The stimulus passed, and unemployment hit 10 percent. But the conventional wisdom is that the stimulus worked, and unemployment would have been worse without it. How do we know this? Model simulations.

In 2020, suppose that, contrary to model forecasts, the death rate drifts down after lockdowns are lifted. We will be told that there would have been many fewer deaths had the lockdowns stayed in place. How will we know this? Model simulations.

General update, May 6

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1. Six years ago, I threw a dance party for myself. I got to select the program of dances. My children were all there. Life was better then.

2. Russ Roberts sent me three pointers. The first one is a Twitter thread from Dr. Muge Cevik. She seems to be another John Alcorn. Her conclusions from various case cluster studies of the transmission process include:

these studies indicate that close & prolonged contact is required for #COVID19 transmission. The risk is highest in enclosed environments; household, long-term care facilities and public transport.

these studies so far indicate that susceptibility to infection increases with age (highest >60y) and growing evidence suggests children are less susceptible, are infrequently responsible for household transmission, are not the main drivers of this epidemic.

these studies indicate that most transmission is caused by close contact with a symptomatic case, highest risk within first 5d of symptoms.

She links to this interesting meta-analysis.

The findings from this systematic review do not support the claim that a large majority of SARS-CoV2 infections is asymptomatic.

3. The next pointer is to John Mandrola, MD.

in one year, will the virus be 1) gone, or 2) less contagious, or 3) less deadly?

He makes the case that the answer is no. In which case, perhaps people should just live their lives as best they can. This is worth a longer comment, which I will try to make later in the week.

4. His third pointer is to Neil Monnery.

Easily the best results to date are from the stringent ‘isolate, test, trace and quarantine’ strategies used by Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and South Korea. It is an approach that requires great preparation, organisation and execution. The key risk is how these countries will do if there is a second or subsequent wave. If that does not occur, or they manage it, even at many multiples of their deaths to date, they will be the key place to look for future learnings.

As you know, I am skeptical that testing and tracing are what is effective. The tests are so unreliable. Tracing is so hard. I am inclined to credit isolation and mask-wearing. And keep in mind that since most of the deaths are among the elderly, how you handle the elderly is likely to matter more than how you handle the spread among those under 50.

5. Robin Hanson writes,

In a pandemic that might be contained, isolating yourself helps others, keeping them from infection. But if pandemic will end with herd immunity, isolating yourself hurts others, pushing them more to be part of the herd that gives everyone immunity. The externality changes sign!

We need to raise the status of Risky Randy and lower the status of Anti-fragile Arnold.

6. Daniel Goldman writes,

However, given that simply reducing the average contact rate by 50% is enough to significantly reduce the rate of spread of the infection, a few minor decisions are all it would take. Moderately reducing frequency and lengths of outings, and being increasingly aware of one’s surroundings are all it would take to significantly reduce average contact rate. It is also likely that during periods where there are reports of high levels of infectious load, employers would be more willing to let an employee stay home and or cut back services.

His idea is that the government should undertake testing to let people know of impending “hot spots,” and then let people make their own decisions in response. Pointer from John Alcorn.

7. Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven J. Davis write,

the COVID-19 shock caused 3 new hires in the near term for every 10 layoffs. These sizable new hires amidst a tremendous overall contraction align well with our anecdotal evidence of large pandemic-induced increases in demand at certain firms. Weekly statistics on gross business formation derived from U.S. administrative data also point to
creation and gross hiring activity, even in the near-term wake of the pandemic.

… Drawing on our survey evidence and historical evidence of how layoffs relate to recalls, we estimate that 42 percent of recent pandemic-induced layoffs will result in permanent job loss.

This is a strong blow to the GDP-factory thinking about this crisis. In fact, it is a PSST story.

8. Doc Searls looks at various industries classified using a matrix I suggested a while back. Can’t really excerpt. I strongly recommend the whole post.

Lockdown socialism watch

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Timothy Taylor writes about the Fed getting into the corporate bond market,

The Fed is starting with $50 billion for the “Primary” fund and $25 billion for the “Secondary” fund. The idea is to then leverage this amount with debt in a 10:1 ratio so that it could end up financing $750 billion in purchases.

You might remember that Congress put all sorts of conditions on giving loans to small business. They had to promise to keep employees and do other things. You can bet that the big boys are going to get their money no matter how many people they lay off.

General update, May 5

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1. A reader writes, “epidemiology as GDP-factory-ism”

So many epidemiology models seem to use THE value for R, or THE case fatality rate (CFR) or THE infection fatality rate (IFR). But these rates differ for different people and different circumstances. It seems the same kind of simplification that treats output as a single something. The simplification can be useful some times but there is such a temptation to use it without asking that question.

If you want to know why I am so adamant and ornery about the models, that is it. They remind me of macroeconometric models, which I am confident are misguided.

The modelers are still at it. The NYT reports,

The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.

I would like to make the following bet with these modelers. I bet that the daily death toll in the last two weeks of May averages less than 2500. Whoever loses the bet has to shut up. If I lose, I stop blogging about the virus. If the modelers lose, then they have to stop reporting results from their models.

Note that Daron Acemoglu and others have disaggregated the typical model into more than one risk bucket. Tyler Cowen enthuses, “I would say we are finally making progress.” I say it’s just more social-engineering drunks searching under the lamppost.

2. Another reader points to an essay by Sean Trende. Difficult to excerpt, the essay seems quite rational to me.

No states are on anything resembling an exponential growth trajectory, almost all states are past a peak, and most states are substantially so. This would suggest that in many states, the question really should be how to reopen while keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed again.

As Tyler Cowen once predicted, we went from insufficient fear to excess fear. With excess fear, it will be difficult to re-start the economy. Even if restrictions are lifted, people will not be confident as consumers or entrepreneurs.

3. Alberto M. Borobia and others look at a cohort of patients at a major teaching hospital in Madrid. It is worth poring over the tables at the end. As I read table 3, out of 665 patients under age 50, only 5 died. That is a mortality rate of less than 1 percent among those hospitalized. To compute the overall infection fatality rate for those in that age group, one would have to multiply by the probability that an infected person becomes hospitalized. If the latter is 0.1, for example, then the IFR would be less than 1 in a thousand. Pointer from John Alcorn.

He also points to a study by Zichen Wang and others of patients in three New York hospitals. As I read the tables, obesity does not seem to be associated with a greater likelihood of death, but hypertension does.

And he points to yet another study, in the LA area. They find that a big difference of male vs. female.

One thing I would like to see from these cohort studies is a really careful analysis of the relationship between the risk from age and the risk from comorbidities, given that the high correlation between the two.

4. Robin Hanson writes,

We are starting to open, and will continue to open, as long as opening is the main well-supported alternative to the closed status quo, which we can all see isn’t working as fast as expected, and plausibly not fast enough to be a net gain. Hearing elites debate a dozen other alternatives, each supported by different theories and groups, will not be enough to resist that pressure to open.

Winning at politics requires more than just prestige, good ideas, and passion. It also requires compromise, to produce sufficient unity. At this game, elites are now failing, while the public is not.

I am not rooting for the elites to win. I don’t think any top-down solution is going to work well. Letting individuals decide which risks they are willing to take is probably the best approach. As someone who will be making risk-averse choices, I do not think others’ riskier choices pose a significant threat to me.

5. A commenter writes,

We shouldn’t be trying to conquer fear so we can go back to the old economy. We should be building the new economy that has an order of magnitude fewer casual human interactions.

Maybe this is overstating it. But I do think that we will see new patterns of specialization and trade, and we need a lot of capitalism to get there.

Fear factor

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In an interview, Paul Romer says,

The key to solving the economic crisis is to reduce the fear that someone will get sick if they go to work or go shop. So it’s really about building confidence. The thing about testing is that it’s easy to explain and it doesn’t frighten people the way digital contact tracing does. It’s not subject to technological and social, political uncertainty the way digital contact tracing is. It doesn’t require the organizational capacity that doing human contact tracing does. It’s really just a very simple, easy-to-explain idea—that to control the pandemic, we need to get a reasonable majority of the people who are infectious into a quarantine, and then we’re good.

I agree with his first sentence. But is mass testing the solution for fear? Clearly, it would work for Paul, and for other people who are fond of abstract theory that has some math to it. But I don’t think my own fear would be any less if there were mass testing. And I can imagine that such a regime would actually stoke fear in a lot of people.

Some other thoughts:

1. Politicians and public officials try to convert fear into Fear Of Others’ Liberty. Their success at this is what expands government and reduces freedom.

2. We are now in a position where anything other than a lockdown causes fear. It takes someone with a lot of pro-Trump mood affiliation or a very disagreeable person like myself to not fear lifting restrictions.

3. Based on what I can infer from my reading, one should really fear being elderly and in a nursing home. One also should fear being elderly and having obesity, heart problems, or hypertension. You should have some fear of being in an enclosed area in which someone else is singing, talking loudly, coughing, or sneezing.

When I need to be in an indoor setting with people other than my wife, I have less fear if everyone, including me, is wearing a face covering. I would not fear being outdoors or touching surfaces touched by others.

But as you know, I wish that public health officials were doing more to verify what to fear and what not to fear, and stop giving us their Bubba Meises and their model forecasts as if they were Science.

General update, May 4

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Many interesting links from Tyler Cowen yesterday.

1. Stephen M. Hedrick wrote in 2004,

Perhaps we should not assume that each and every disease can be controlled by vaccination. Considering the biological invention that has been directed toward thwarting T cell responses and antibody reactions, the possibility exists that for some agents, the acquired immune system is not up to the task. Other avenues of treatment might be more efficacious, but in a more fatalistic vein, one might conclude that the most effective means of controlling disease, as it has always been, is public sanitation, vector control, and education. A parasite can’t replicate in a host to which it has no access. It is antithetical to biomedical science as practiced in western countries, but technology may not be the answer to most of the world’s infectious diseases.

2. David Goldhill sounds like me.

3. Dhal M. Dave and others write concerning shelter in place orders (SIPOs),

using daily state-level measures of social mobility from SafeGraph, Inc., we document that statewide SIPOs were associated with a 5 to 10 percent increase (relative to the pre-treatment period) in the share of the population that sheltered in place completely on anygiven day. This treatment-control differential increases during the first week following SIPO adoption and then remains constant or slightly declines. Next, turning to COVID-19, difference-in-differences estimates show that the adoption of a SIPO had little effect on COVID-19 cases during the five (5) days following its enactment, corresponding to the median incubation period. However, after the incubation period, and intensifying rapidly three weeks or more after the policy’s adoption, SIPO adoption is associated with an up to 43.7 percent decline in COVID-19 cases. Approximately 3 to 4 weeks following SIPO adoption, this corresponds to approximately 2,510 fewer cumulative COVID-19 cases for the average SIPO-adopting state. Evidence from event study analyses is consistent with common pre-treatment trends. . .While statewide SIPOs were negatively related to coronavirus-related deaths, but estimated mortality effects were imprecisely estimated.

My guess is that if they could have shown that government restrictions lower death rates, they would have shouted it from the rooftops.

4. CNBC reports,

data released from the country’s central bank and a leading Swedish think tank show that the economy will be just as badly hit as its European neighbors, if not worse.

Pointer from Scott Sumner. I agree with Scott that this is no surprise.

Lin and Meissner find

Job losses have been no higher in US states that implemented “stay-at-home” during the Covid-19 pandemic than in states that did not have “stayat-home”.

Pointer from John Alcorn.

Most of the change in behavior comes from individual decisions. At the margin, the government restrictions are probably stupid. They keep hospitals from performing helpful procedures on non-virus patients. They restrict access to beaches and parks, when it is likely that fresh air is a good thing nowadays. They impose the greatest change in behavior on the young people with the lowest risk. And they do not have a visible effect on death rates–probably because the people who are at risk and have choices about behavior are already doing what they can to minimize their exposure to the virus.

5. Russ Roberts says that we need to let the price system work in the market for masks.

Markets are failing in America because we’re not letting them work. It’s not a market failure. It’s a policy failure.

. . .You get more stuff when you let the price go up. We should use prices in a crisis, not just in normal times.

6. Bryan Caplan writes,

Populists notwithstanding, there is nothing “dishonorable” about raising prices to eliminate shortages. If governments or customers refuse to see this great truth, there is nothing dishonorable about raising prices in less-visible ways. Businesspeople, you do not merely have a right to “gouge.” As long as shortages persist, gouging is the right thing to do. Gouge is good!

His point is that business owners themselves are too reticent about raising prices.

7. J. Feliz-Cardoso and others write,

The EuroMOMO network monitors weekly all-cause age-specific excess mortality in countries in Europe through a standardised approach.

Can one find anything comparable here? The authors recalculate excess mortality using their own methods. They seem to find that it is concentrated among those over age 65, especially men.