A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A ray of sunshine in these dark COVID-19 times, from the Harvard Bookstore, Yes She Can: 10 Stories of Hope & Change from Young Female Staffers of the Obama White House:
It’s part of a series, but the bookstore said they were sold out of the volume from “young female staffers of the Bill Clinton White House.”
#Inspiring
Full post, including commentsWhat do the Russians get up to when they’re not interfering in our elections? Thus far, stopping coronavirus pretty much dead in its tracks (see “Why does Russia, population 146 million, have fewer coronavirus cases than Luxembourg?” (CNN), in which border patrol, public health, and CDC-type workers simply do the job for which they are paid).
What’s it like on the ground in Moscow? My sources say that house calls are available for anyone who wishes to be tested. Call a phone number and a technician shows up with a small suitcase of equipment. A sample is collected. The lab result is delivered the next day. In the meantime, the person who called for the test is told to stay at home.
[Update from reader comment: the merely paranoid or curious cannot get a test. Tests are reserved for those with some risk factor, e.g., travel.]
How about here in Massachusetts? Only hospital inpatients and health care providers are tested. The testing presumably happens at some location where everyone who is likely to have coronavirus has assembled (i.e., if you didn’t have COVID-19 before you showed up for the test, you will have it a little later!).
[If Trump gets the blame for everything that has gone wrong in the U.S. with our state public health departments, state governor actions/inactions, CDC work, FDA failures to approve, lax border controls, etc., does that mean we have to credit Vladimir Putin for the diligent work of all of the low- and mid-level Russian government and health care workers? If so, does that make Putin a true savior of humanity?]
Update 3/28: “There have been 1,264 cases of coronavirus infections reported in Russia so far and four deaths.” (Moscow Times) I.e., if we believe that the testing capability is comparable (which it almost surely isn’t, since it isn’t comparable from U.S. state to U.S. state), all of Russia (144 million people) is about as badly hit as Tennessee (7 million). The article describes a variety of “flatten the curve” measures, such as a one-week paid holiday. So, ultimately, the Russian approaching to controlling the outbreak may end up not being that different from any other country’s.
Related:
“Coronavirus disease 2019: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures,” a March 19, 2020 peer-reviewed article by John Ioannidis, best-known for “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, cites a few issues:
This guy is such a contrarian that Donald Trump is not mentioned even once as a cause for American and worldwide woes!
Some of his theories:
Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, the governor has ordered every “non-essential” business to close as of tomorrow at noon (marijuana retail is considered “essential” as well as “liquor stores”; people can be stoned and drunk while at home waiting for their government, alimony, and/or child support checks). We have no idea how widespread the infection is because the only people who get tested are hospital inpatients or medical personnel (i.e., the “new cases” figures out of Massachusetts are actually “people newly hospitalized and who test positive”).
One thing that seems to be too hot for any politician to handle is putting a price on human life. The FAA does this routinely in deciding whether to impose a new regulation. It was only $650,000 back in 1985 says the New York Times, with the average agency using $1-2 million and the EPA using the highest numbers. The Department of Transportation uses closer to $10 million today (2016 guidance). Heather Mac Donald in The Spectator:
Around 40,000 Americans die each year in traffic deaths. We could save not just one life but tens of thousands by lowering the speed limit to 25 miles per hour on all highways and roads. We tolerate the highway carnage because we value the time saved from driving fast more.
(One positive of coronaplague: For the first time in years, here in Massachusetts we have regularly been able to drive more than 25 miles per hour!)
Maybe right now the answer is “each additional day that a human can live, regardless of that person’s age and health status, is worth $infinite”? So we shut down society if there is any chance that any person sick with coronavirus won’t get the complete range of medical services that would have been available in December 2019? But we also have to make sure that everyone else who has a different medical issue also gets the complete range of services that would have been available in December 2019, e.g., a second liver transplant for an IV drug user, $2 million in cancer therapy for an imprisoned felon, weeks in the ICU billed to Medicare for a 95-year-old, etc. Therefore, if human life is truly priceless, we have to shut down whenever 10% of the hospital beds are occupied by coronavirus patients?
Related:
Full post, including commentsA friend’s son developed a low fever last week, a stiff neck, and some other cold/flu-type symptoms. He is a strapping college-age lad. She arranged a doctor’s appointment for him last Friday. The clinic was empty and he was met outside by a nurse who put a mask on him. He was diagnosed with “maybe a virus, possibly meningitis”. Due to his temperature being only 99, he was not given one of the scarce coronavirus tests, but he did have a range of other tests. On Saturday, the family got the test results: maybe meningitis, maybe leukemia(!). This will take some sorting out, apparently.
I’m posting this because I think it explains the mask shortage. Before the coronaplague, only the doctors and the occasional flu patient had to wear a mask. Now a mask gets used (and thrown out) every time a patient comes into the health care system for any reason.
Related:
David St. Hubbins: “It’s such a fine line between stupid.”
My idea for an airline that wouldn’t sell its middle seats was greeted with derision back in December 2019. Apparently it was on the “stupid” side of the fine line.
If people won’t support the idea in the name of comfort, speed of boarding/unloading, and overall efficiency, maybe fear of death will make the proposal look better?
A coach seat with a guaranteed empty middle seat provides even more separation from a potentially disease-ridden fellow passenger than a first class seat, right? How is that not worth 50 percent more in the coronavirus age? Set a minimum pitch comparable to JetBlue’s Extra Room seats and everyone can travel again for a reasonable price, with reasonable protection from contagion, a lot faster (total time, including boarding), and with a lot less stress from Fall of Saigon-style lines at the gate. (Throw in a free N95 mask for each passenger as soon as the supply chain returns to normal.)
Full post, including commentsA good movie plot involves a Cassandra-like figure warning humanity and doom ensuing when the warnings aren’t heeded. Coronaplague seems to fit this narrative perfectly. From New Yorker magazine (worldwide pandemic causing them to momentarily pause their all-Trump format?):
Around 5 p.m. on December 30th, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates group on WeChat. He told them that “seven confirmed cases of sars” were in quarantine at the hospital, then followed up with a correction: it was an unspecified coronavirus, which later became known as 2019-nCoV. Li wasn’t authorized to share the information, but he wanted to warn his former classmates—mostly fellow-physicians—so that they would know to protect themselves. He asked them not to share the news outside the group, but soon the chat had spread—via screenshot, with Li’s name attached—throughout and beyond Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Li was irritated at first, but understanding.
Eight hours later, at one-thirty in the morning, Li received a phone call summoning him to the offices of the municipal health commission, where his superiors were attending an emergency conference; there, hospital leadership questioned him about the WeChat message. Later that day, while at work, Li was called to the “inspection section”—essentially a political arm of the hospital, which concerns itself with political transgressions, as opposed to professional ones—for more disciplinary meetings. On January 3rd, Li’s local police station called and informed him that he was required to sign and fingerprint an admonition letter for spreading “untrue speech.
It was not until January 20th that President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.”
Why were the superiors “attending an emergency conference”? Was it possibly to investigate the same phenomenon that Li Wenliang had observed? If so, weren’t Chinese public health officials doing whatever it is they do to investigate an epidemic? The leader of the country didn’t issue a statement until three weeks later? Isn’t that close to the minimum time that we’d expect? In hindsight it seems obvious that this was going to be huge, but why would it be obvious immediately? (China had bird flu outbreaks in 2013. 2014, 2015, and 2017 that were scary, but ultimately proved to be insignificant; if the government had shut down the country sooner than the first three weeks of those flu outbreaks, it wouldn’t have been the right decision.)
If we’re going to use the benefit of hindsight, even if Li Wenliang’s message had gotten out to everyone in China and been believed, can we say with confidence that the country would have immediately taken drastic measures? European and North American countries didn’t take drastic measures, despite knowing everything that Li Wenliang was saying and a lot more, until thousands of people were surely infected.
U.S. Media loves to explain things with “China government bad”, but could what happened be explained just as easily with “Viruses are smarter than humans” combined with “Humans, especially when organized into large government bureaucracies, are not nimble”?
Full post, including commentsThe biggest inequality of coronavirus is that those who are fortunate enough to be young and healthy have the additional good fortune of being less likely to suffer serious consequences from an infection.
What about the economic inequality?
Public school teachers around the country are getting weeks of 100% paid staycation (literally). In many places they need not do any work at all (though some school districts are moving to Asian-style online learning). Pension and retirement health care entitlements (worth $millions): guaranteed by law.
Other government workers? Either 100% pay to “work from home” or 100% pay to be exposed to a deadly virus in an “essential” job. (see “Towered airports reverting to uncontrolled fields”)
Americans who studied the Work Versus Welfare Trade Off and realized that, depending on the state, they’d have roughly the same spending power on welfare compared to working a median-wage job? Continue living rent-free in public housing, continue receiving free health care, continue receiving food stamps, continue chatting on Obamaphone, continue watching Amazon Prime streaming video at half price. No pressure to leave the apartment since no job to begin with…
The roughly 5 million Americans who live on cash payments from former sex partners (alimony, child support, etc.)? Paid at 100% or the former sex partner goes to prison (in theory, the alimony or child support court order could be modified to reflect the new lower income of the defendant, but the defendant would have to go to court, file to start a full-scale lawsuit, and wait for a resolution (could take 1-2 years in Massachusetts before the plague, but now courts are mostly shut down) before the obligation to pay is reduced).
Health care workers: Revenue collapse for those in elective/routine areas (mostly ordered closed). A bit of overtime pay and near-100% certainty of getting coronavirus for those in the emergency/hospital sector of the industry.
Restaurant workers? Fired. Collect unemployment at 30-40% of former salary.
Uber drivers? 0% of former salary unless they want to risk death from contact with customers, in which case it might be 15%.
House cleaners: 30% of former salary as customers become paranoid of what infections the cleaners might bring into the house from other households?
Retail workers, including at essential stores such as grocery and pharmacy? If they go to work, they get paid roughly the same as before, but with a constant risk of exposure to a deadly virus.
Small business owners: 0% of former income as government orders the business shut. Potential to lose all wealth accumulated in business if the enterprise cannot be restarted.
Big business owners (shareholders in public companies): 60% of former wealth due to stock market collapse; 0% of former income as dividend payments are eliminated.
The percentage of Americans who are willing to take a risk in the market segment of our economy dwindles every year, but I wonder if the coronavirus will convince yet more young Americans that their best futures lie either in working for the government (higher skill young people) or collecting welfare (lower skill young people). In an increasingly densely populated country that makes epidemics inevitable, why take the huge economic risk of working in the private sector?
Full post, including commentsWe have Holocaust deniers. We have climate change deniers. I’m wondering what we call the author of “Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19” (Medium deleted the heresy, but it remains available from ZeroHedge, along with a biologist’s rebuttal in disjointed Twitter form).
He marshals a lot of scientific-sounding evidence, as promised by the title. One thing that he does that we never see in our media is look at things on a per-capita basis rather than in absolute numbers:
On a per-capita basis, we shouldn’t be panicking
Every country has a different population size which skews aggregate and cumulative case comparisons. By controlling for population, you can properly weigh the number of cases in the context of the local population size. Viruses don’t acknowledge our human borders. The US population is 5.5X greater than Italy, 6X larger than South Korea, and 25% the size of China. Comparing the US total number of cases in absolute terms is rather silly.Rank ordering based on the total number of cases shows that the US on a per-capita basis is significantly lower than the top six nations by case volume. On a 1 million citizen per-capita basis, the US moves to above mid-pack of all countries and rising, with similar case volume as Singapore (385 cases), Cyprus (75 cases), and United Kingdom(3,983 cases). This is data as of March 20th, 2020.
(Maybe he is wrong about the above because of the trajectory? The U.S. case volume is still growing exponentially, right? Or maybe it is actually close to constant, but we’re doing an exponentially increasing number of tests?)
He thinks our policymakers have it all wrong. Sample:
Closing schools is counterproductive. The economic cost for closing schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (0.1–0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel.
This is more or less in sync with the U.K., which decided to close its schools but leaves them open for the children of health care, grocery store, and similar essential adult workers.
Readers: Help me out here. Why is this COVID denier (or “coronavirus denier”) wrong? I desperately want this to be true:
Due to COVID-19’s sensitivity to UV light and heat (just like the normal influenza virus), it is very likely that it will “burn off” as humidity increases and temperatures rise.
Texas is running 1/30th the cases per capita compared to New York, so maybe this is true or maybe New York just had worse luck regarding early infectees.
His ideas at the end regarding expanding medical capacity don’t seem realistic.
COVID-19 is a significant medical threat that needs to be tackled by both finding a cure and limiting spread; however, some would argue that a country’s authoritarian response to COVID-19 helped stop the spread. Probably not. In South Korea and Taiwan, I can go to the gym and eat at a restaurant which is more than I can say about San Francisco and New York, despite a significantly lower caseload on a per-capita basis.
None of the countries the global health authorities admire for their approach issued “shelter-in-place” orders, rather they used data, measurement,and promoted common sense self-hygiene.
Does stopping air travel have a greater impact than closing all restaurants? Does closing schools reduce the infection rate by 10%? Not one policymaker has offered evidence of any of these approaches. Typically, the argument given is “out of an abundance of caution”. I didn’t know there was such a law. Let’s be frank, these acts are emotionally driven by fear, not evidence-based thinking in the process of destroying people’s lives overnight. While all of these decisions are made by elites isolated in their castles of power and ego, the shock is utterly devastating Main Street.
A friend who runs a gym will run out of cash in two weeks. A friend who is a pastor let go of half of his staff as donations fell by 60%. A waitress at my favorite breakfast place told me her family will have no income in a few days as they force the closure of restaurants. While political elites twiddle their thumbs with models and projections based on faulty assumptions, people’s lives are being destroyed with Marxian vigor. The best compromise elites can come up with is $2,000.
Does it make more sense for us to pay a tax to expand medical capacity quickly or pay the cost to our whole nation of a recession? Take the example of closing schools which will easily cost our economy $50 billion. For that single unanimous totalitarian act, we could have built 50 hospitals with 500+ beds per hospital.
If the U.S. government were to build hospitals starting right now, wouldn’t they be only half-finished by the time the Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese finish work on a good vaccine? And where would we find doctors and nurses to staff these new hospitals? Before the plague hit it could take three months to get an appointment with a doctor. (Example: expansion of Suburban Hospital in my old home town of Bethesda, Maryland. They started planning in 2008, broke ground around 2014, and the building was ready for use in March 2020 (just in time!).)
I am hoping that we will never figure out whether Aaron Ginn, COVID denier, was correct. If the epidemic is contained, the governors who ordered U.S. states to shut down can take credit for saving us. But Mr. Ginn might have been right and perhaps the virus died out of its own accord. Only if the epidemic is not contained can we say definitively that the coronavirus deniers were wrong. (But maybe if the virus keeps our hospitals full at a steady rate for the next 12-18 months we could also say that Mr. Ginn was wrong? Either way, let’s hope we can’t prove him wrong!)
[Update: How about the rebuttal linked to from ZeroHedge? The biologist, Bergstrom, starts by attacking Ginn for not being an epidemiologist (but the media is happy to give a platform to people without epidemiology background as long as they are suggesting additional hysteria and shutdowns (a physicist suggesting a five-week lockdown)!). Bergstrom says that the “drop in apparent growth rates” is due to a shift in testing strategy (I would expect the growth in testing capacity to move the needle in the other direction, actually). For 10, which I think is , “COVID-19 is spreading, but probably not accelerating”, Bergstrom responds with a personal attack:
I hate to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but using this lie to sweep away the disaggregated data is such utter nonsense that I wonder how a silicon valley guy could make this claim by mistake.
Did he forget that it was folks in Silicon Valley who thought that Elizabeth Holmes knew more about blood testing than entire buildings full of chemistry Ph.D.s at Siemens and similar European vendors?
Bergstrom attacks Ginn for using a bell curve analogy. He ensures continued employment at his university by noting righteously that the authors of the Bell Curve book (which actually contains almost nothing related to the hateful alleged correlation between race and IQ) are to be condemned. Then he points out, that other formulae, such as log-normals and exponentials, are also found in nature. Now that Bergstrom raises this point, I don’t think that it makes a lot of sense to map a probability distribution onto a time series. But Wikipedia suggests that this observation goes back to a British epidemiologist. It does seem to be an established idea that the course of an epidemic will have a shape that is sort of like a bell curve.
(Bergstrom is a professor at University of Washington. So outrageously wrong was that one chapter about race v. IQ in the Bell Curve book that his university has decided to admit students in roughly the ratios that the book would suggest (and then the school is so interested in race that it publishes stats for 2019-2020!). African Americans are underrepresented and the Asians whom the IQ researchers say are smarter than whites are hugely overrepresented.)
I don’t think that anyone has enough information to say if Ginn is right or wrong. My gut feeling is that he is at least partially wrong due to the fact that no government anywhere in the world is doing exactly what he suggests (though the UK seems to be coming close!). But I think this rebuttal is weak and it shows that viruses, in addition to being smarter than the average human, are also smarter than the average tenured professor of biology!]
Related:
On the lighter side of a dark topic… will Americans start naming dogs “Community Spread”?
Separately, Mindy the Crippler has never been happier. She has her whole family home almost all the time now.
Full post, including commentsStupid question… Why isn’t hand sanitizer back on store shelves?
I can understand how all of the product in stock as of a week ago got sold. But the production lines are still running. Do stores such as Target, Costco, and CVS have standing orders for hand sanitizer based on demand forecast? Or do they wait for supplies to run low and then zap an order automatically to the wholesalers?
Either way, it is tough for me to understand how hoarders, eBay and Amazon reseller profiteers, etc. could have bought up hand sanitizer that was still in production and/or still in transit. If there are standing orders, shouldn’t retailers now be restocked? Maybe they are, but 20 minutes after opening they’ve sold it all? How is that possible, given that they’re limiting to 2 per customer?
Plainly demand for this product is high, but a lot of businesses that would order it are now shut down. Health clubs, for example, theme parks, a lot of office buildings, etc. Shouldn’t the lack of re-orders from these folks balance out, to some extent, the panic buying from consumers?
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