Category: Uncategorized
Sweden Covid-19 update
Do not judge Sweden until the autumn. That was the message from its state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in May and through the summer as he argued that Sweden’s initial high death toll from Covid-19 would be followed in the second wave by “a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low”.
Now the autumn is here, and hospitalisations from Covid-19 are currently rising faster in Sweden than in any other country in Europe, while in Stockholm — the centre for both the first and second waves in the country — one in every five tests is positive, suggesting the virus is even more widespread than official figures suggest.
Even Sweden’s public health agency admits its earlier prediction that the country’s Nordic neighbours such as Finland and Norway would suffer more in the autumn appears wrong. Sweden is currently faring worse than Denmark, Finland and Norway on cases, hospitalisations and deaths relative to the size of their population.
…The number of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 is doubling in Sweden every eight days currently, the fastest rate for any European country for which data is available. Its cases per capita have sextupled in the past month to more than 300 new daily infections per million people, close to the UK and way ahead of its Nordic neighbours.
Here is more from Richard Milne at the FT. To be clear, it seems that many of the Swedish deaths are due to a “dry tinder” effect, so in relative terms they are not doing as much worse than you might think. Other parts of Europe may well catch up to them, at least on a “tinder-adjusted” basis. But if you are just asking which predictions of which model are being vindicated here, it is that the herd immunity obtained through a partial neutralization of super-spreaders is temporary rather than permanent.
Source here. And Swedish deaths seem to be 40% of the U.S. equivalent.
To be clear, I did not predict this (or its opposite), but rather for many months I have been saying we need more data from Sweden to draw a conclusion. Now we have more data.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Adjusted seroprevalence across Karnataka was 46.7% (95% CI: 43.3-50.0), including 44.1% (95% CI: 40.0-48.2) in rural and 53.8% (95% CI: 48.4-59.2) in urban areas.” And speculative results on whether Indians have strong Covid immunity. And Kenya was at about five percent seroprevalence as of May-June.
2. The Neo Rauch dispute over right-wing art (NYT).
3. I have been neglecting to cover synthetic nanobodies, merely out of sloth, but in fact they hold great potential, both against Covid-19 and more generally. And have we discovered protection against HIV acquisition in women? It seems so. What an incredible year for biomedicine.
4. A review of Where is My Flying Car?
5. My Salem Center (UT Austin) talk and podcast on the ethics of current vaccine choices.
6. How Azerbaijan won. Drones! And Bruno on the decline of Russian power in the region.
UAE China fact of the day
Rochelle Crossley has been working as a flight attendant in the UAE and received a COVID-19 vaccination after thousands of injections were rolled out to frontline workers.
“The fear of getting the virus outweighed the fear of having the vaccination,” Ms Crossley told 9News.
I am glad to see somebody computing expected value. By the way, that is Sinopharm, not Sinovac. And:
More than 30,000 people in the UAE have received injections as part of phase three trials.
Here is the article, via Air Genius Gary Leff.
Toward a universal medical test?
UC San Francisco scientists have developed a single clinical laboratory test capable of zeroing in on the microbial miscreant afflicting a patient in as little as six hours – irrespective of what body fluid is sampled, the type or species of infectious agent, or whether physicians start out with any clue as to what the culprit may be.
The test will be a lifesaver, speeding appropriate drug treatment for the seriously ill, and should transform the way infectious diseases are diagnosed, said the authors of the study, published Nov. 9 in Nature Medicine.
The advance here is that we can detect any infection from any body fluid, without special handling or processing for each distinct body fluid,” said study corresponding author Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Department of Laboratory Medicine and director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center.
Here is the full story, via David Lim.
That was then, this is now, wartime casualties edition
U.S. Civil War combat deaths per day: 449
World War II U.S. combat deaths per day: 297
Covid-19 U.S. deaths per day: > 1,000
And rising, 1500 per day seems baked in, 2000 per day might also be within reach. I just don’t get you people who say this isn’t a big deal.
By the way, deaths as a percentage of population isn’t the right metric here. Losing 320,000 lives (including excess deaths) has about the same moral import, whether or not there are a billion Morlocks living under the earth’s surface, though that fact would change the loss greatly as measured in percentage terms and of course make it look much smaller.
If one thousand lives (and more) per day is not a big deal, then what is? The global toll is much larger of course, and most of the gdp contraction has come from fear rather than lockdowns per se — see for instance Sweden.
And as Scott Gottlieb tweeted:
This is not a question of lockdowns vs no lockdowns. The question is how do we take targeted measures, get broader compliance to prudent steps like masks, distancing, avoiding large gatherings; to reduce, slow spread so that the healthcare system doesn’t risk getting overwhelmed.
You won’t do a bit of restraint to stem these losses, and shift infections into the future, while a good vaccine is coming not to mention other therapeutics? Or try this simple question: If you are a limited government libertarian, then when would you deploy government action if not now?
Speaking of “that was then, this is now,” here is Jeffrey Tucker of AIER (of GBD fame) predicting, circa October 14, that there will never be a vaccine.
A love letter to law and economics education
“Quantifying Economic Reasoning in Court: Judge Economic Sophistication and Pro-business Orientation” (draft coming soon)
Abstract: By applying computational linguistics tools to the analysis of US federal district courts’ decisions from 1932 to 2016, this paper quantifies the rise of economic reasoning in court cases, ranging from securities regulation to antitrust law. I then relate judges’ level of economic reasoning to their training. I find that the significant judge heterogeneity in economic sophistication can be explained by attendance at law schools with a large presence of the law and economics faculty. Finally, for all regulatory cases from 1970 to 2016 I hand code whether the judge ruled in favor of the business or the government. I find that judge economic sophistication is positively correlated with a higher frequency of pro-business decisions even after controlling for political ideology and a rich set of other judge covariates.
That is the job market paper of Siying Cao, who is on the job market from the University of Chicago. Here is her home page.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Lewis Jackson on money in politics.
2. Cowen’s Second Law: “Criminal cannibalism: An examination of patterns and styles.”
3. “Black Churches still comprise the majority of the church chapter 11 filings.”
4. Laura Deming mental models for science and other things. And short history of the mRNA vaccine. And maybe the vaccine is 97% effective. And caveat lector out the wazoo, but here is a new report on the Sputnik vaccine. You will note the Russians are in any case having big problems scaling production.
5. Data on diversity and hiring practices in Silicon Valley.
Right-thinking Henry Olsen on Trump voter fraud
None of these early warning signs of fraud appear in the results.
There is much more detail and argument at the link. Via Ross Douthat.
Predictions of the herd immunity theorists
If you are still pondering the Great Barrington Declaration and related matters, let us try a simple empirical test about predictions. Start with this from one of the authors of the Declaration:
…the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, Sunetra Gupta. In May she declared: “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in this country.”
Link here. The UK just hit 500 deaths a day, highest since May and about 2x the current U.S. rate.
She also said:
“So I think the [infection fatality rate, or IFR] would be definitely less than one in 1,000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000. That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.”
Dominic Lawson continues:
As Sam Bowman, of the free-market Adam Smith Institute — and therefore far from an illiberal interventionist — observed: “By this point, 36,000 had died of Covid in the UK. If 100% of the UK’s population had had Covid by then, the UK would have had to have a population of 360 million people for her low-end IFR to be right.”
Or why not read that august institution The Otago Times?:
Sweden’s former top virus expert says lockdowns are just a way of delaying the inevitable and warns that New Zealand could face years of quarantining foreigners entering the country, even after wiping out Covid-19.
Johan Giesecke has defended his country’s coronavirus strategy, saying lockdowns do not prevent surges in cases or deaths, but merely delay them.
Giesecke believes it is “futile” to attempt to stop the spread and says most countries will end up in a similar position, regardless of their strategy, until treatment can be found.
He believes Denmark, Norway and Finland, which are in full lockdown, will end up with the same number of cases as Sweden, which isn’t, as soon as their restrictions ease.
He also says New Zealand will begin importing cases from overseas, after successfully suppressing the virus during lockdown.
To avoid that, quarantine measures will have to stay in place until a vaccine is developed – something he says could take a decade, or longer.
Come on people, you were wrong. By the way, “Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States hit an all-time high of 61,964 on Tuesday,” and deaths running about 1,300 a day. Not a nothingburger. p.s. One in five survivors end up diagnosed with a mental illness.
Movie podcast with Abe (and Agnes) Callard
We discuss Iranian cinema, most of all Farhadi films, focusing on the two best, namely A Separation and About Elly. At the end I hit Abe with a dose of underrated vs. overrated, mostly movies again. The host is Russell Hogg. Here is Abe on Twitter, here is Abe doing short films. Abe is the son of Agnes.
Tuesday assorted links
What should I ask John O. Brennan?
The former head of the CIA, grew up in North Bergen, NJ, fluent in Arabic. I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his Wikipedia page. Here is his new book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad.
So what should I ask him?
School choice in Los Angeles
By Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns have some very positive results on school vouchers:
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We leverage the design of the program to study the impact of neighborhood school choice on student achievement, college enrollment, and other outcomes using a matched difference-in-differences de-sign. Our findings reveal that the ZOC program boosted test scores and college enrollment markedly, closing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and school-specific gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality.The model allows us to measure the increase in competition facing each ZOC school based on household preferences and the spatial distribution of schools. We demonstrate that the effects of ZOC were larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel driving the impacts of ZOC. In addition, demand estimates suggest families place a larger weight on school quality compared to peer quality, providing schools the right competitive incentives. An analysis using randomized admission lotteries shows that the treatment effects of admission to preferred schools declined after the introduction of ZOC, a pattern that is explained by the relative improvements of less-preferred schools. Our findings demonstrate the potential for public school choice to improve student outcomes while also underscoring the importance of studying market-level impacts when evaluating school choice programs.
Here is a link to the paper, note that Christopher is on the job market this year from UC Berkeley.
Monday assorted links
1. A new argument against prison abolition (or is it new?). Or try this joyous hymn to Engels.
2. The evidence for the male breadwinner norm maybe isn’t that strong.
3. Magnus is now doing “ultrabullet.” Watch some here. That is fifteen seconds per game. No increment. The games are really quite remarkable to “watch.”
4. Alfred Russel Wallace, “How to Civilize Savages” (1865).
What I’ve been reading
1. Gregory M. Collins, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. Burke is underrated as an economist, and also more generally. This very thorough and thoughtful book goes a long way toward setting the record straight. In the meantime, it is not sufficiently well known just how much Keynes was influenced by Burke.
2. Terryl Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know. Perhaps if one needs to read this book, one is also under-qualified to comment on it. Still it seemed very good to me and providing one of the better introductions. I hadn’t know for instance that Abraham and even Adam to some extent were “in on” the covenant all along.
3. R.F. Foster, On Seamus Heaney. A very good “short book essay” on one of my favorite poets. That is a UK link, here is what you get when you search U.S. Amazon. How can that be? These days you can search Amazon better using Google than using Amazon itself.
4. Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics. It makes sense that a biography of Veblen should be…somewhat verbose. Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution for anyone interested in the topic. To me the main question is why the libertarian right takes Veblen more seriously these days than does the Left, perhaps it is because they read Veblen and immediately think of Wokeism?
5. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology. From the 1830s, this remains one of the great scientific classics. I had never known how well-reasoned or beautifully written it was, a big positive surprise for me. Not just a bunch of crusty old rocks, though it is also about…a bunch of crusty old rocks.
There is Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order.
John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to Covid-19 is a short but useful treatment of what its title promises. I had not known that both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were opposed to compulsory vaccination.