Thursday assorted links
1. Nicaragua still has a full calendar of sports (NYT).
2. An alternating lockdown strategy.
3. Vox on the Watney Stapp Mercatus mask plan.
4. Derek Lowe on vaccine prospects.
5. Will coronavirus change the proper CPI bundle?
6. “This paper argues that daily ‘universal random testing’, as recently proposed by Paul Romer, is not likely to be an effective tool for reducing the spread of Covid-19 and resuming economic activity. We find that more than 21% of the population would need to be tested every day to reduce the Covid-19 reproduction rate (R’) to 0.75, as opposed to 7% as argued by Romer. We show this using a corrected method for calculating the impact of an infectious person on others, when testing and isolation takes place. Our calculation allows for asymptomatic cases. Instead we propose ‘stratified periodic testing’ as an alternative strategy.” Link here.
7. Why is Detroit worse than Baltimore? And is there also a Brazilian heterogeneity? (limited information, however)
8. JPMorgan reopening plan, involves building herd immunity among the young. This is where the discussion will be headed soon.
9. How well did Italy do lowering R0 through lockdown? An informal estimate, but very important and underdiscussed.
11. Ongoing chart of Covid-19 deaths in Sweden, also accounting for reporting delays.
12. Who is this helping? (NYT): “Amazon said Wednesday that it would temporarily halt its operations in France after a court ruled the company had failed to adequately protect warehouse workers against the threat of the coronavirus and that it must restrict deliveries to only food, hygiene and medical products until it addressed the issue.”
13. YouTube talk by Sweden’s chief epidemiologist (have not heard it yet).