The decline in pandemic sports viewership
It is not mainly about NBA politics:
- US Open (golf) final round: down 56%
- US Open (tennis) was down 45% and the French open is down 57% so far
- Kentucky Derby: down 43%
- Indy 500: down 32%
- Through four weeks, NFL viewership is down approximately 10%
- NHL Playoffs were down 39% (Pre Stanley Cup playoffs was down 28% while the Stanley Cup was down 61%).
- NBA finals are down 45% (so far). Conference finals were down 35%, while the first round was 27% down. To match the viewership, activity on the NBA reddit fan community is also down 50% from the NBA finals last year.
That is from Daniel Frank, here are a few of his hypotheses:
- Sports are very social. People love talking about sports with their peers and without interacting with as many people, people have less opportunities to talk about sports with others. This has the effect of making fans feel less engaged and more casual fans less likely to start watching, creating a cascading effect on engagement.
- Watching sports is a great way for people to tune out, relax and distract themselves from normal life. With so many people working from home, having a less defined break from work to non-work, and potentially working less hard, watching sports feels like less of an escape than it used to.
- People have started consuming politics like they do sports and their interest in sports has been cannibalized by political fanaticism.
- Lots of people are experiencing mental health challenges and struggling and don’t have the same interest in things they used to enjoy like sports.
My intuitions are quite close to Daniel’s — what do you all think?
Thursday assorted links
1. Unrules.
2. New Italian results on monoclonal antibodies. And “Being previously infected with coronaviruses that cause the “common cold” may decrease the severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infections…”
3. “A substantial proportion of individuals in this population showed antibody reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 antigens despite low serological evidence of SARS-CoV-2 exposure.” Still a big puzzle!
4. How to rethink Chinese history.
5. A virus has infected scarlet fever bacteria and the results are not good.
Claims about politics (speculative)
Among white liberals under 30, nearly half have a mental health condition, compared to 21-26 % among centrists and conservatives. H/t @ZachG932 https://t.co/iG9saHtvRR
— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) April 12, 2020
First, I don’t think “liberals” is exactly the right word here, but I’m not going to relitigate that one now. Second, as I’ve argued in my The Age of the Infovore (and in some forthcoming writings you haven’t seen yet), I don’t think “mental health condition” is appropriate in this context. Furthermore, what are called “mental health conditions” often are sources of insight and can be positively correlated with talent.
That all said, I don’t think you can understand modern American discourse, most of all social media, without recognizing that “the intellectual Left” has higher neuroticism — as defined by Five-Factor personality theory — than say centrists. The Right of course has its own correlations, but that is a topic for another time.
Emergent Ventures winners, new India cohort
A further Covid-19 India Prize goes to award winning journalist Barkha Dutt for her reporting on the Covid pandemic and related crises in India.
Because of the Covid lockdown (March-June 2020), Indian news reporting and broadcasting faced severe disruptions in March-April 2020. For the first 50 days, as television networks remained studio-bound, Dutt and her small team traveled across India to report from the ground, producing over 250 ground reports. All the videos and reports are available on the MoJo youtube channel.
One of the world’s most severe lockdowns unleashed a massive internal migration from the cities to the villages in India. Dutt’s team was one of the first to shed light on the erroneous state policies concerning economic migrants in India during the lockdown,, often while walking alongside migrants. Her sustained coverage eventually led other stations and newspapers to follow and report similar stories and invoked a policy response from the government.
Another Covid-19 India Prize goes to award winning data journalist Rukmini S, for The Moving Curve Podcast, covering the data issues in India. She is currently an independent journalist writing for Mint, The Print, India Today (where she is tracking the pandemic daily) and India Spend (she is tracking Covid mortality) and writes occasionally for The Guardian, SCMP and The Hindu.
She distills all the information, data, and her daily insights into a 5-7-minute audio update in the form of a free podcast, now at 92 episodes. The episodes range from getting to the heart of India’s death statistics, interviewing a rural doctor about what it’s like waiting for Covid to hit, to attempting to cut through India’s public/ private healthcare binary, and they have had significant influence on many state governments. The Moving Curve podcast is produced by a small team of two – Rukmini S and sound engineer Anand Krishnamoorthi. The podcast is available on the major platforms as well as on medium.
Monoclonal antibodies are doing very well
In the study, 112 patients received 2.8 grams of each of the antibodies, and 156 received placebo. The difference in viral load was statistically significant at day 11, unlike some doses of Lilly’s single-antibody cocktail. There was also a statistically significant reduction in viral levels three days and seven days after infection.
The treatment also improved symptoms, according to a scored questionnaire, and resulted in fewer hospital and emergency room visits. Visits to the hospital or ER were made by 5.8% of patients in the placebo group, but just 0.9% of those who received the antibody combination. That difference, however, was just barely statistically significant.
Lilly said that it has already begun talking to regulators around the world about its single antibody treatment, and has filed with the Food and Drug Administration for an emergency use authorization…
Lilly said it anticipates it could have as many as 1 million doses of its one-antibody treatment, LY-CoV555, available in the fourth quarter of 2020, with 100,000 available this month. But for the combination therapy, just 50,000 doses will be available in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Both antibody regimens have been well-tolerated, with no serious side effects, the company said.
Here is the full story from StatNews. Big news, but not a surprise to everyone.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The economics of vending machines.
2. Geneva introducing a minimum wage of $25 an hour.
3. Senegal proceeding with festival that usually attracts four to five million people (NYT).
4. Those new service sector quarantine work for the super-rich jobs. And Covid-19 and acedia.
5. New calculations on what is needed for herd immunity.
6. A much quicker and easier serological test.
7. Lessons from the Israeli second wave. Good stuff, but I would note a common tension found in many discussions. When arguing against herd immunity and “segregate the old” approaches, it is common to note “you can’t stop the young from infecting the old,” though that point in the broader picture does not in fact work against herd immunity approaches.
My Conversation with Audrey Tang
For me one of the most fun episodes, here is the audio, video, and transcript. And here is the longer than ever before summary, befitting the chat itself:
Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described “conservative anarchist” is a software engineer and the first non-binary digital minister of Taiwan. Their work focuses on how social and digital technologies can foster empathy, democracy, and human progress.
Audrey joined Tyler to discuss how Taiwan approached regulating Chinese tech companies, the inherent extraterritoriality of data norms, how Finnegans Wake has influenced their approach to technology, the benefits of radical transparency in communication, why they appreciate the laziness of Perl, using “humor over rumor” to combat online disinformation, why Taiwan views democracy as a set of social technologies, how their politics have been influenced by Taiwan’s indigenous communities and their oral culture, what Chinese literature teaches about change, how they view Confucianism as a Daoist, how they would improve Taiwanese education, why they view mistakes in the American experiment as inevitable — but not insurmountable, the role of civic tech in Taiwan’s pandemic response, the most important remnants of Japanese influence remaining in Taiwan, why they love Magic: The Gathering, the transculturalism that makes Taiwan particularly open and accepting of LGBT lifestyles, growing up with parents who were journalists, how being transgender makes them more empathetic, the ways American values still underpin the internet, what he learned from previous Occupy movements, why translation, rotation, and scaling are important skills for becoming a better thinker, and more.
This bit could have come from GPT-3:
COWEN: How useful a way is it of conceptualizing your politics to think of it as a mix of some Taiwanese Aboriginal traditions mixed in with Daoism, experience in programming, and then your own theory of humor and fun? And if you put all of that together, the result is Audrey Tang’s politics. Correct or not?
TANG: Well as of now, of course. But of course, I’m also growing, like a distributed ledger.
And this:
COWEN: You’re working, of course, in Taiwanese government. What’s the biggest thing wrong with economists?
TANG: You mean the magazine?
COWEN: No, no, the people, economists as thinkers. What’s their biggest defect or flaw?
TANG: I don’t know. I haven’t met an economist that I didn’t like, so I don’t think there’s any particular personality flaws there.
Finally:
COWEN: Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?
TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.
COWEN: Have we started correcting them yet?
TANG: I’m sure that you have.
Definitely recommended.
New Canadian data on mask effectiveness
We estimate the impact of mask mandates and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) on COVID-19 case growth in Canada, including regulations on businesses and gatherings, school closures, travel and self-isolation, and long-term care homes. We partially account for behavioral responses using Google mobility data. Our identification approach exploits variation in the timing of indoor face mask mandates staggered over two months in the 34 public health regions in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. We find that, in the first few weeks after implementation, mask mandates are associated with a reduction of 25 percent in the weekly number of new COVID-19 cases. Additional analysis with province-level data provides corroborating evidence. Counterfactual policy simulations suggest that mandating indoor masks nationwide in early July could have reduced the weekly number of new cases in Canada by 25 to 40 percent in mid-August, which translates into 700 to 1,100 fewer cases per week.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Alexander Karaivano, Shih En Lu, Hitoshi Shigeoka, Gong Chen, and Stephanie Pamplona.
Why are North and South India so different on gender?
Region is a strong predictor of female survival, literacy, autonomy, employment, and independent mobility. A woman with the exact same household wealth/ caste/ religion will likely have more autonomy if she lives in the South.
It does not seem to be a function of wealth, nor was colonialism a major factor. And cousin marriage, which is more prevalent in the south? Alice notes:
Southern women may have gained autonomy despite cousin marriage, not because of it.
Islam, however, is one factor:
In sum, gender segregation became more widespread under Islamic rule. Men continue [to] dominate public life, while women are more rooted in their families, seldom gathering to resist structural inequalities.
But perhaps most significantly:
Female labour force participation is higher in states with traditions of labour-intensive cultivation…
Wheat has been grown for centuries on the fertile, alluvial Indo-Gangetic plain. Cultivation is not terribly labour-intensive, though cereals must still be processed, shelled and ground. This lowers demand for female labour in the field, and heightens its importance at home.
Rice-cultivation is much more labour intensive. It requires the construction of tanks and irrigation channels, planting, transplanting, and harvesting. Women are needed in the fields. Rice is the staple crop in the South.
And this:
Pastoralism may have also influenced India’s caste-system. Brahmins dominate business, public service, politics, the judiciary, and universities. Upper caste purity and prestige has been preserved through female seclusion, prohibiting polluting sexual access. These patriarchal norms may be rooted in ancient livelihoods. Brahmins share genetic data with ancient Iranians and steppe pastoralists. Brahmins also comprise a larger share of the population in North India and only 3% in Tamil Nadu.
Over the centuries, male superiority may have become entrenched.
Finally:
Northern parents increasingly support their daughters’ education, but this is primarily to improve their marriage prospects, not work outside the home.
There is much, much more at the link, including some excellent maps, visuals, and photos.
How rational individual decisions can make the pandemic worse, and why a good response is hard to maintain
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The more time passes, the more I wonder if I have, in fact, contracted an asymptomatic version of Covid. The chance of that was quite small in February, but as each month passes it becomes modestly more likely. That realization could easily nudge many people into taking just a bit more risk.
Another train of thought considers the possibility of having a pre-existing protective immune response, perhaps from T-Cells. Experts are not sure of the likelihood or magnitude of this effect, but some have suggested that as many as one-third of Americans may have some built-in protection.
Again, as the months pass, it’s rational for me to upgrade the probability that I have such a protective immune response. With the passage of time, I will feel more protected than I used to.
The basic reasoning is straightforward: Since I haven’t caught a bad form of it by now, I must be relatively safe. Many Americans may or may not grasp the finer points of the immunology and the Bayesian statistical reasoning, but that is a very common-sense kind of response.
And so such people will take more risk — to the detriment of the broader community.
There is much more at the link, including a discussion of intertemporal substitution. These are some reasons why initially good (or bad) Covid responses tend to get worse, relevant for Europe as well.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Update on Portuguese drug decriminalization (NYT).
2. Tidbits from the White House physician. And that was quick markets in everything commemorative coin.
3. Brink Lindsey and Samuel Hammond do a deep dive on many important policy issues.
4. Fiscal data for African polities since 1890.
6. “There are 19,000 economists in the US. Close to half are working in or around DC. New York is not even in the top five of states.” Link here, has more of interest.
Superspreaders data from India
Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways and mortality rate of 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. It is the largest contact tracing study — which is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person — conducted in the world for any disease.
Lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar in PEI, said that the paper is the first large study to capture the extraordinary extent to which SARS-CoV-2 hinges on “superspreading,” in which a small percentage of the infected population passes the virus on to more people. The researchers found that 71% of infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts, while a mere 8% of infected individuals accounted for 60% of new infections…
The researchers found that the chances of a person with coronavirus, regardless of their age, passing it on to a close contact ranged from 2.6% in the community to 9% in the household. The researchers found that children and young adults — who made up one-third of COVID cases — were especially key to transmitting the virus in the studied populations.
“Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting, which is something that hasn’t been firmly established in previous studies,” Laxminarayan said. “We found that reported cases and deaths have been more concentrated in younger cohorts than we expected based on observations in higher-income countries.”
Here is the press release, here is the original research.
A Cost/Benefit Analysis of Clinical Trial Designs for COVID-19 Vaccine Candidates
I am very happy to see this new and urgently needed study. They have heeded the stricture to show their work. The authors are Donald A. Berry, Scott Berry, Peter Hale, Leah Isakov, Andrew W. Lo, Kien Wei Siah, and Chi Heem Wong, and here is the abstract:
We compare and contrast the expected duration and number of infections and deaths averted among several designs for clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including traditional randomized clinical trials and adaptive and human challenge trials. Using epidemiological models calibrated to the current pandemic, we simulate the time course of each clinical trial design for 504 unique combinations of parameters, allowing us to determine which trial design is most effective for a given scenario. A human challenge trial provides maximal net benefits—averting an additional 1.1M infections and 8,000 deaths in the U.S. compared to the next best clinical trial design—if its set-up time is short or the pandemic spreads slowly. In most of the other cases, an adaptive trial provides greater net benefits.
And what is an adapted trial you may be wondering?:
An adaptive version of the traditional vaccine efficacy RCT design (ARCT) is based on group sequential methods. Instead of a fixed study duration with a single final analysis at the end, we allow for early stopping for efficacy via periodic interim analyses of accumulating trial data…While this reduces the expected duration of the trial, we note that adaptive trials typically require more complex study protocols which can be operationally challenging to implement for test sites unfamiliar with this framework. In our simulations, we assume a maximum of six interim analyses spaced 30 days apart, with the first analysis performed when the first 10,000 subjects have been monitored for at least 30 days.
That means of course you might cut the trial short. Kudos to the authors for producing one of the most important papers of this year.
Brown University Graduate Student Admission Pause
To better support our current students through the global pandemic, admissions for the graduate program will be paused for the 2021-2022 academic year. We look forward to resuming our admissions process and reviewing applications.
That is everything behind the link — go model that one! Can’t they borrow some money? Won’t a vaccine be ready by then? I know most university endowments are restricted, but…?
I thank Jon for the pointer.
It’s getting better and worse at the same time
That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt:
The larger question is how to know when this great stagnation is ending. Counterintuitively, the answer might be when people are most upset — because that’s generally how most humans react to change, even when it proves beneficial in the longer run. These feelings arise in part from the chaos and disruption brought about by some pretty significant changes.
And:
People, here is the good news and the bad news: Change is upon us. We are entering a new era of crises — in politics and biomedicine, with climate and energy, and not incidentally, about how prudently we spend our time.
The regretful truth is that progress is never going to be easy. The great technological advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, remember, were followed by two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism. Innovations such as radio and the automobile improved countless lives but also broadcast Hitler speeches and led to destructive tanks.
I’m not predicting the same catastrophe for today. I’m only saying that when the discontent is palpable, as it is right now in America, keep in mind that true breakthroughs may already be underway.
The examples are in the longer text. Recommended!