Wednesday assorted links

1. “Variation in skill can explain 44 percent of the variation in diagnostic decisions, and policies that improve skill perform better than uniform decision guidelines.”  Not a Covid-19 paper, but relevant of course, link here.

2. Which states are practicing social distancing the most? (NYT)

3. Human challenge studies to accelerate a vaccine.

4. My Bloomberg column on how the macroeconomics of Covid-19 do and do not resemble WWII.  Oops, correct link here.

5. The idea of “group testing” actually came from economist Robert Dorfman of Harvard (who taught me history of economic thought way back when).  And more on pooled tests.  And Nebraska is doing pooling.

6. “Use Surplus Federal Real Property to Expand Medical and Quarantine Capacity for COVID-19.”

7. Why scaling up testing is so hard (New Yorker).

8. We still don’t know the CFR for H1N1.

9. “Overlooked is the possibility that beauty can influence college admissions.”  But not for Chinese it seems.

10. Mullainathan and Thaler with some deregulatory suggestions (NYT).

11. “The Food and Drug Administration will allow doctors across the country to begin using plasma donated by coronavirus survivors to treat patients who are critically ill with the virus, under new emergency protocols approved Tuesday.”

12. Benjamin Yeoh on early vaccine use.

13. James Stock: “The most important conclusion from this exercise is that policy hinges critically on a key unknown
parameter, the fraction of infected who are asymptomatic. Evidence on this parameter is scanty, however
it could readily be estimated by randomized testing.”

14. Two elite factions in tension with each other (nasty stuff, please do not read).