Month: April 2020
Wednesday assorted links
1. Invite a llama or goat to your next corporate Zoom meeting or video call for under $100. And new Oumuamua theory, but kind of boring.
2. Turning old shipping containers into mobile intensive care units.
3. Contemporary novels longer than 500 pages, some of them good.
5. Critique of the IHME epidemiological model, recommended. And a few more criticisms. And here is Karl T. Bergstrom, very good points. Recommended.
6. Update on French-speaking vs. German-speaking Swiss cantons. File under “heterogeneities.”
7. “But the operation can be no longer than two hours as that is how long a rhino can be safely anaesthetised.” It is hard to make a rhino.
8. Data on indoor outbreaks, striking results. Outdoors seems pretty safe.
Re-starting the economy
Will the U.S. economy re-open prematurely?:
New NBER survey of U.S. small companies nber.org/papers/w26989 Here is the percent, by industry, saying their business will still exist if the crisis lasts 6 months: All retail (except grocers): 33% Hotels: 27% Personal services: 22% Restaurants and bars: 15%
That is from Derek Thompson. Or when will the non-payment of mortgages render the banking system insolvent and beyond saving by the Fed?
At some point, irreversible, non-linear economic damage sets in, and we won’t let that happen, no matter how many times someone tells you “there is no trade-off between money and lives.”
For some time now I have thought that America will reopen prematurely, with a very partial and indeed hypocritical reopening, but a reopening nonetheless. In May, in most states but at varying speeds, including across cities.
You can see from this Chicago poll of top economists that virtually all of them oppose an early reopening. I don’t disagree with their analysis, but they are too far removed from the actual debate.
America is a democracy, and the median voter will not die of coronavirus (this sentence is not repeated enough times in most analyses). And so we will reopen pretty soon, no matter what the full calculus of lives and longer-run gdp might suggest.
Lyman Stone favors ending the lockdown. It does not matter whether you agree with him or not. Matt Parlmer predicts revolution if we don’t reopen in time. I don’t agree with that assessment, but he is thinking along the right lines by not regarding the reopening date as entirely a choice variable.
The key is to come up with a better reopening rather than a worse reopening.
Any model of optimal policy should be “what should we do now, knowing the lockdown can’t last very long?” rather than “what is the optimal length of lockdown?”
And our best hope is that the risk of an early reopening spurs America to become more innovative more quickly with masks, testing, and other methods of reducing viral and economic risk.
CA Put Construction Into Limbo
One silver lining of the crisis is that the country has been getting rid of a lot of regulations that slow things down. CA, however, has decided to slow things down even more.
REASON: Last week, the Judicial Council of California—the rule-making body for the state’s courts—issued 11 emergency rules for the judicial system during the current pandemic.
Included in the council’s rules was a blanket extension of deadlines for filing civil actions until 90 days after the current state of emergency ends. Ominously for housing construction, this extended statute of limitations applies to lawsuits filed under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
That law requires local governments to study proposed developments for potentially significant environmental impacts. CEQA also gives third parties the power to sue local governments for approving a construction project if they feel that a particular environmental impact wasn’t studied enough.
The law has become a favored tool of NIMBYs and other self-interested parties to delay unwanted developments or to extract concessions from developers. Anti-gentrification activists use CEQA to stop apartment buildings that might cast too much shadow. Construction unions use the law as leverage to secure exclusive project labor agreements.
Under normal circumstances, these CEQA lawsuits have to be filed within 30 or 35 days of a project receiving final approval.
Notice that the law doesn’t say the NIMBYs get an extra 30 or 35 days to file. It says that NIMBYs get to file until 90 days “after the current state of emergency ends.” In other words, no one can know when they are free to build so the law could put every CA construction project that hasn’t already past CEQA review into limbo.
“If I’m a builder I can’t move forward with my project until the [CEQA] statute of limitations has expired. The reason why I can’t do that is because if you do move forward, courts have the authority to order you tear down what you’ve built,” Cammarota tells Reason, explaining that “lenders today are unwilling to fund those loans for construction until the statute of limitations has expired.”
Hat tip: Carl Danner.
Some realistic thinking, including about 2024
It is urgent to understand the future of severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. We used estimates of seasonality, immunity, and cross-immunity for betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 from time series data from the USA to inform a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We projected that recurrent wintertime outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave. Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded. To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. Additional interventions, including expanded critical care capacity and an effective therapeutic, would improve the success of intermittent distancing and hasten the acquisition of herd immunity. Longitudinal serological studies are urgently needed to determine the extent and duration of immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024.
That is the abstract of a new piece by Stephen M. Kissler, Christine Tedijanto, Edward Goldstein, Yonatan H. Grad, and Marc Lipsitch.
The implication of course is that changes to the structure of production will be far-reaching unlike say in 2008. Ongoing social distancing will limit productivity and very drastically shape demand. This to some extent militates against response measures that assume “the economy as we knew it” will be bouncing back in a few months’ time.
The new (old) federalism under coronavirus
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
As May begins, it seems highly likely that the states will be reopening at their own paces and with their own sets of accompanying restrictions, with some places not reopening at all. There is likely to be further divergence at the city and county level, with say New York City having very different policies and practices than Utica or Rochester upstate.
Such divergence in state policy is hardly new. But until now states have typically had many policies in common, on such broad issues as education and law enforcement and on narrower ones such as support for Medicaid. Now and suddenly, on the No. 1 issue by far, the states will radically diverge.
Hence the idea that America is inching closer to what it was under the Articles of Confederation, which governed the U.S. from 1781 to 1789. The U.S. constitutional order has not changed in any explicit manner, but the issues on which the states are allowed to diverge have gone from being modest and relatively inconsequential to significant and meaningful if not dominant.
And:
This divergence may create further pressures on federalism. In Rhode Island, for example, state police have sought to stop cars with New York state license plates at the border, hindering or delaying their entrance. Whether such activities are constitutional, most governors do have broad authority to invoke far-reaching emergency powers.
As some states maintain strict lockdowns while others reopen and allow Covid-19 to spread, such border-crossing restrictions could become more common — and more important. Maryland has been stricter with pandemic control than has Virginia, so perhaps Maryland will deny or discourage entry from Virginia — in metropolitan Washington, there are only a few bridges crossing the river that divides the two states. Or maybe Delaware won’t be so keen to take in so many visitors from New Jersey, while Texas will want to discourage or block migration from Louisiana.
To be clear, I think this unusual situation will recede once Covid-19 is no longer such a serious risk.
The Jesús Fernández-Villaverde-Chad Jones epidemiological model
Here are the slides, definitely recommended. Might this be my favorite epidemiological model so far?
I interpret the last few slides as being gloomy for some “star early performers,” including California, though you should not necessarily attribute that view to the authors.
Why isn’t Sweden exploding?
…Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell remains calm: he is not seeing the kind of rapid increase that might threaten to overwhelm the Swedish health service, and unlike policymakers in the UK, he has been entirely consistent that that is his main objective.
That is from a new piece by Freddie Sayers, asserting that “the jury is still out” when it comes to Sweden. I cannot reproduce all of the graphs in that piece, but scroll through and please note that in terms of per capita deaths Sweden seems to be doing better than Belgium, France, or the United Kingdom, all of which have serious lockdowns (Sweden does not). If you measure extant trends, Sweden is in the middle of the pack for Europe. And here is data on new hospital admissions:
Now I understand that ideally one should compare similar “time cohorts” across countries, not absolute numbers or percentages. That point is logically impeccable, but still as the clock ticks it seems less likely to account for the Swedish anomaly.
Of course we still need more days and weeks of data.
To be clear, I am not saying the United States can or should copy Sweden. Sweden has an especially large percentage of people living alone, the Swedes are probably much better at complying with informal norms for social distancing, and obesity is much less of a problem in Sweden than America, probably hypertension too.
But I’d like to ask a simple question: who predicted this and who did not? And which of our priors should this cause us to update?
I fully recognize it is possible and maybe even likely that Sweden ends up being like Japan, in the sense of having a period when things seem (relatively) fine and then discovering they are not. (Even in Singapore the second wave has arrived, from in-migration, and may well be worse than the first.) But surely the chance of that scenario has gone down just a little?
And here is a new study on Lombardy by Daniil Gorbatenko:
The data clearly suggest that the spread had been trending down significantly even before the initial lockdown. They invalidate the fundamental assumption of the Covid-19 epidemiological models and with it, probably also the rationale for the harshest measures of suppression.
One possibility (and I stress that word possibility) is that these Lombardy data, shown at the link, are reflecting the importance of potent “early spreaders,” often family members, who give Covid-19 to their families fairly quickly, but after which the average rate of spread falls rapidly.
I’ll stand by my claim that the pieces on this one show an increasing probability of not really adding up. In the meantime, I am very happy to pull out and signal boost the best criticisms of these results.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Senators are not good at stock picking, even when related to their committee assignments.
3. Economic analysis of optimal lockdown. I definitely think this exercise is worth doing, but the researchers, as economists, ignore most of the critical public choice and sustainability issues, much as other researchers do.
4. What makes Ringo a great drummer (video). And is music getting better or worse? (data from streaming)
6. How testing works, or doesn’t work, in New Jersey.
7. An epidemiologist addresses my questions (something Twitter was unable to do), bravo to him.
8. Apichatpong Weerasethakul plum tree update. And ““This is the first transnational geopolitical Twitter war Thais have engaged in,” said Prajak Kongkirati of Bangkok’s Thammasat University.” (NYT)
9. Markets in everything: “Hamas Willing to Trade Information on Israelis Held in Gaza for Ventilators.”
10. Reopening guidelines from John Cochrane.
11. Sarah Constantin on variolation.
12. David Henderson argues for liberation from lockdown. Not my view, but I think his strongest argument is that greater freedom will induce us to rush with innovation in test and trace, masks, etc.
13. How soon does it end? Preliminary results, but very important. There is so much interesting in that link, including the possibility that California needs to worry more than does New York. Recommended. I’ll be saying more about these issues soon and of course waiting for the final results.
14. Why serology is more difficult than it looks. And look at these pictures.
16. Superspreaders (NYT): ““The MERS-CoV outbreak in South Korea was driven primarily by three infected individuals, and approximately 75 percent of cases can be traced back to three superspreaders who have each infected a disproportionately high number of contacts,” wrote George F. Gao, an immunologist and virologist at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, in a recent paper.”
17. The Wolfram Physics Project, lots there.
Tabarrok On Macro Musings
I talk COVID-19 with David Beckworth on the latest episode of Macro Musings. We cover quite a bit of material including the real Corona threat that we are totally unprepared for and no one is talking about. Self-Recommending.
Emergent Ventures Covid-19 prizes, second cohort
There is another round of prize winners, and I am pleased and honored to announce them:
1. Petr Ludwig.
Petr has been instrumental in building out the #Masks4All movement, and in persuading individuals in the Czech Republic, and in turn the world, to wear masks. That already has saved numerous lives and made possible — whenever the time is right — an eventual reopening of economies. And I am pleased to see this movement is now having an impact in the United States.
Here is Petr on Twitter, here is the viral video he had a hand in creating and promoting, his work has been truly impressive, and I also would like to offer praise and recognition to all of the people who have worked with him.
The covid19india project is a website for tracking the progress of Covid-19 cases through India, and it is the result of a collaboration.
It is based on a large volunteer group that is rapidly aggregating and verifying patient-level data by crowdsourcing.They portray a website for tracking the progress of Covid-19 cases through India and open-sources all the (non-personally identifiable) data for researchers and analysts to consume. The data for the react based website and the cluster graph are a crowdsourced Google Sheet filled in by a large and hardworking Ops team at covid19india. They manually fill in each case, from various news sources, as soon as the case is reported. Top contributor amongst 100 odd other code contributors and the maintainer of the website is Jeremy Philemon, an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, majoring in Computer Science. Another interesting contribution is from Somesh Kar, a 15 year old high school student at Delhi Public School RK Puram, New Delhi. For the COVID-19 India tracker he worked on the code for the cluster graph. He is interested in computer science tech entrepreneurship and is a designer and developer in his free time. Somesh was joined in this effort by his brother, Sibesh Kar, a tech entrepreneur in New Delhi and the founder of MayaHQ.
3. Debes Christiansen, the head of department at the National Reference Laboratory for Fish and Animal Diseases in the capital, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.
Here is the story of Debes Christiansen. Here is one part:
A scientist who adapted his veterinary lab to test for disease among humans rather than salmon is being celebrated for helping the Faroe Islands avoid coronavirus deaths, where a larger proportion of the population has been tested than anywhere in the world.
Debes was prescient in understanding the import of testing, and also in realizing in January that he needed to move quickly.
Please note that I am trying to reach Debes Christiansen — can anyone please help me in this endeavor with an email?
Here is the list of the first cohort of winners, here is the original prize announcement. Most of the prize money still remains open to be won. It is worth noting that the winners so far are taking the money and plowing it back into their ongoing and still very valuable work.
The Geographic Spread of COVID-19 Correlates with Structure of Social Networks as Measured by Facebook
There is a new NBER working paper (by economists) on Covid-19:
We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 “hotspots” (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after controlling for geographic distance to the hotspots as well as for the income and population density of the regions. These results suggest that data from online social networks may prove useful to epidemiologists and others hoping to forecast the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID-19.
That is by Theresa Kuchler, Dominic Russell, and Johannes Stroebel.
The macroeconomic costs of Covid-19
Our illustrative exercise implies a year-on-year contraction in U.S. real GDP of nearly 11 percent as of 2020 Q4, with a 90 percent confidence interval extending to a nearly 20 percent contraction. The exercise says that about 60 percent of the forecasted output contraction reflects a negative effect of COVID-induced uncertainty.
Here is much more, a full paper from Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, and Stephen J. Terry, an all-star team for this project.
Policy for Covid-19, from Policy.NZ
Chris McIntyre from Wellington emails me:
“Pleased to share that COVID-19 Policy Watch is now live at www.covid19policywatch.org [links fixed]. We currently cover federal policies for 12 countries, including the US, UK, and China, with 15 more underway. We expect to expand our network of publishing partners from three, to five over the coming days. All feedback is most welcome.
A blurb for MR readers to edit as you see fit:
We aim for COVID-19 Policy Watch to be the most accessible source for governments’ policy responses to COVID-19 so that researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the general public can quickly learn about and compare governments’ responses. If you think this is important, we’d love your help: we’re seeking publishing partners (news media, universities, research groups) to keep country policies up to date, and experienced front- and back-end Drupal devs to help build new features. Interested parties should email [email protected].
TC again: I am pleased to announce that Policy.NZ is a new Emergent Ventures winner (not Fast Grants with its biomedical orientation, rather “classic” Emergent Ventures).
An econometrician on the SEIRD epidemiological model for Covid-19
There is a new paper by Ivan Korolev:
This paper studies the SEIRD epidemic model for COVID-19. First, I show that the model is poorly identified from the observed number of deaths and confirmed cases. There are many sets of parameters that are observationally equivalent in the short run but lead to markedly different long run forecasts. Second, I demonstrate using the data from Iceland that auxiliary information from random tests can be used to calibrate the initial parameters of the model and reduce the range of possible forecasts about the future number of deaths. Finally, I show that the basic reproduction number R0 can be identified from the data, conditional on the clinical parameters. I then estimate it for the US and several other countries, allowing for possible underreporting of the number of cases. The resulting estimates of R0 are heterogeneous across countries: they are 2-3 times higher for Western countries than for Asian countries. I demonstrate that if one fails to take underreporting into account and estimates R0 from the cases data, the resulting estimate of R0 will be biased downward and the model will fail to fit the observed data.
Here is the full paper. And here is Ivan’s brief supplemental note on CFR. (By the way, here is a new and related Anthony Atkeson paper on estimating the fatality rate.)
And here is a further paper on the IMHE model, by statisticians from CTDS, Northwestern University and the University of Texas, excerpt from the opener:
- In excess of 70% of US states had actual death rates falling outside the 95% prediction interval for that state, (see Figure 1)
- The ability of the model to make accurate predictions decreases with increasing amount of data. (figure 2)
Again, I am very happy to present counter evidence to these arguments. I readily admit this is outside my area of expertise, but I have read through the paper and it is not much more than a few pages of recording numbers and comparing them to the actual outcomes (you will note the model predicts New York fairly well, and thus the predictions are of a “train wreck” nature).
Let me just repeat the two central findings again:
- In excess of 70% of US states had actual death rates falling outside the 95% prediction interval for that state, (see Figure 1)
- The ability of the model to make accurate predictions decreases with increasing amount of data. (figure 2)
So now really is the time to be asking tough questions about epidemiology, and yes, epidemiologists. I would very gladly publish and “signal boost” the best positive response possible.
And just to be clear (again), I fully support current lockdown efforts (best choice until we have more data and also a better theory), I don’t want Fauci to be fired, and I don’t think economists are necessarily better forecasters. I do feel I am not getting straight answers.
Monday assorted links
1. Why isn’t the public more supportive of free trade?
2. How easy the spread on college campuses?
3. A bunch of medical claims, interesting, neither endorsing nor damning.
7. Are children’s face-to-face social skills declining?
8. “Church of England moves valuables to Tower of London amid fears of lockdown looting.”
9. Robin Hanson poll-based risk indicator.
10. An epidemiological account of how risk-spreader heterogeneity matters.
11. Harvard to sell $1.1 billion bonds. And pending cuts to higher ed.
12. Stephon Marbury, prophet for the NBA (WSJ). And Scott Gottlieb on employer testing (WSJ).