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Emergent Ventures prize winners for coronavirus work
I am happy to announce the first cohort of Emergent Ventures prize winners for their work fighting the coronavirus. Here is a repeat of the original prize announcement, and one week or so later I am delighted there are four strong winners, with likely some others on the way. Again, this part of Emergent Ventures comes to you courtesy of the Mercatus Center and George Mason University. Here is the list of winners:
Social leadership prize: Helen Chu and her team at the University of Washington. Here is a NYT article about Helen Chu’s work, excerpt:
Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time…
As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.
To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.
By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.
What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.
And to think Helen is only an assistant professor.
Data gathering and presentation prize: Avi Schiffmann
Here is a good write-up on Avi Schiffmann, excerpt:
A self-taught computer maven from Seattle, Avi Schiffmann uses web scraping technology to accurately report on developing pandemic, while fighting misinformation and panic.
Avi started doing this work in December, remarkable prescience, and he is only 17 years old. Here is a good interview with him:
I’d like to be the next Avi Schiffmann and make the next really big thing that will change everything.
Here is Avi’s website, ncov2019.live/data.
Prize for good policy thinking: The Imperial College researchers, led by Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist.
Neil and his team calculated numerically what the basic options and policy trade-offs were in the coronavirus space. Even those who disagree with parts of their model are using it as a basic framework for discussion. Here is their core paper.
The Financial Times referred to it as “The shocking coronavirus study that rocked the UK and US…Five charts highlight why Imperial College’s research radically changed government policy.”
The New York Times reported “White House Takes New Line After Dire Report on Death Toll.” Again, referring to the Imperial study.
Note that Neil is working on despite having coronavirus symptoms. His earlier actions were heroic too:
Ferguson has taken a lead, advising ministers and explaining his predictions in newspapers and on TV and radio, because he is that valuable thing, a good scientist who is also a good communicator.
Furthermore:
He is a workaholic, according to his colleague Christl Donnelly, a professor of statistical epidemiology based at Oxford University most of the time, as well as at Imperial. “He works harder than anyone I have ever met,” she said. “He is simultaneously attending very large numbers of meetings while running the group from an organisational point of view and doing programming himself. Any one of those things could take somebody their full time.
“One of his friends said he should slow down – this is a marathon not a sprint. He said he is going to do the marathon at sprint speed. It is not just work ethic – it is also energy. He seems to be able to keep going. He must sleep a bit, but I think not much.”
Prize for rapid speedy response: Curative, Inc. (legal name Snap Genomics, based in Silicon Valley)
Originally a sepsis diagnostics company, they very rapidly repositioned their staff and laboratories to scale up COVID-19 testing. They also acted rapidly, early, and pro-actively to round up the necessary materials for such testing, and they are currently churning out a high number of usable test kits each day, with that number rising rapidly. The company is also working on identifying which are the individuals most like to spread the disease and getting them tested first. here is some of their progress from yesterday.
Testing and data are so important in this area.
General remarks and thanks: I wish to thank both the founding donor and all of you who have subsequently made very generous donations to this venture. If you are a person of means and in a position to make a donation to enable this work to go further, with more prizes and better funded prizes, please do email me.
The Coronavirus Killed the Progressive Left
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Yes trolling, but trolling with the truth. Here are scattered excerpts:
— The egalitarianism of the progressive left also will seem like a faint memory. Elites are most likely to support wealth redistribution when they feel comfortable themselves, and indeed well-off coastal elites in California and the Northeast are a backbone of the progressive movement. But when these people feel threatened in their lives or occupations, or when the futures of their children suddenly seem less secure, redistribution will not be such a compelling ideal…
— The case for mass transit also will seem weaker, because subways and buses will be associated with the fear of Covid-19 transmission. In a similar fashion, the forces of NIMBY will become stronger, relative to those of YIMBY, because people secure in their isolated suburban homes will feel less stressed than those in densely packed urban apartment buildings.
— There is likely to be much more government intervention in some parts of the health-care sector, but it will focus on scarce hospital beds and ventilators, and enforce nasty triage, rather than being a benevolent move toward universal coverage. If anything, it will drive home the message that supply constraints are binding and America can’t have everything — hardly the traditional progressive message.
— — The climate change movement is likely to be another victim. How much have you heard about Greta Thunberg lately? Concern over the climate will seem like another luxury from safer and more normal times. In addition, the course of anti-Covid-19 efforts may not prove propitious for the climate change movement. If the fight against Covid-19 suddenly improves (perhaps a vaccine working very quickly?), Americans may come to expect the same in the fight against climate change.
There is much more at the link, of course some of you will hate it. And of course Sanders and Warren did not exactly dominate voter sentiment, and that was largely pre-Covid.
The coronavirus polity that is Australia
And, despite not knowing what threat the SETREP-ID would be enacted for, the group had pre-emptive ethical clearance to immediately gather samples from patients – something which would take weeks or months in other countries.
It is believed that this has saved thousands of lives, here is the full story, via Rohan Claffy.
Where are the systemic financial pressures right now?
Adam Tooze at the NYT has the very best piece I have seen on this question. You do need to read the whole thing, but here is part of the opening bit:
For the second time this century, the world is facing an acute shortage of dollar funding. This is a big problem: An enormous amount of global financial activity depends on the use of the dollar. If we are to contain the fallout from the crisis, America’s central bank must act as a lender of last resort not just to America’s financial system but also to the entire world’s.
Essential.
Why such a large difference in fatality rates across European nations?
Here is a relevant tweet thread started by Moritz Kuhn, many interesting comments. For instance Moritz writes: “What is more, it may provide a warning sign for those countries where the elderly and the young live close together, how important it is to contain the virus there early on. These countries are within Europe in particular such as Serbia, Poland Bulgaria, Croatia, or Slovenia.”
Also on Italy, Dan Klein writes to me:
- They kiss, hug more, converse longer.
- Young people live with their parents, family more.
- They smoke somewhat more (packs smoked per capita twice that of Sweden). Smoking weakens the lungs. But also we smokers finger and thumb our cigs and then put them into our mouth. Wash hands first!
- For these and whatever adventitious reasons, Italy was early to the problem, and it spread before people learned to adjust behavior.
We will learn more soon.
Friday assorted links
3. Which states are prepared for the drone revolution? A Mercatus report card.
5. What is the polite way to title this one?
6. The 1957 flu.
7. Todd and Victoria Buchholz: “Send every U.S. household a $500 prepaid debit card to spend later this year in the ‘experience economy.’” (WSJ)
8. Joe Lonsdale: “Swiftscale Biologics turns a labor-intensive process into a data-intensive one, cutting development time down to a single month.”
9. Good short piece by Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan.
10. John Cochrane on stopping time and debt forbearance.
11. jstor now open to the public, better than the NBA Finals.
12. U.S. Digital Response to Covid-19: “We are seeing that COVID-19 is already overwhelming the data and digital capacities of government in a myriad of ways, and we are calling on technology, data, and government professionals to step up and help.”
13. New competition in forecasting Covid-19.
14. The impact of coronavirus on foot traffic, from SafeGraph.
Aren’t you glad we don’t have net neutrality?
The EU has called on streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube to limit their services in order to prevent the continent’s broadband networks from crashing as tens of millions of people start working from home.
Until now, telecoms companies have been bullish that internet infrastructure can withstand the drastic change in online behaviour brought about by the coronavirus outbreak.
But on Wednesday evening, Thierry Breton, one of the European commissioners in charge of digital policy, said streaming platforms and telecoms companies had a “joint responsibility to take steps to ensure the smooth functioning of the internet” during the crisis.
Here is the full FT piece, possibly not gated these days?
The polity that is Nicaragua
In order to support those affected by the virus, Nicaragua’s government has organized massive public rallies across the country under the slogan “Love Walk in the Time of Covid-19,” resembling the title of the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
Here is the link, via William V.
Thursday assorted links
1. India database on Covid-19.
2. Jerry Brito’s feed of newstories on coronavirus.
3. David Beckworth on the Fed and direct cash transfers.
4. Ozimek and Lettieri propose emergency loans for small businesses.
5. Bohemian Rhapsody, but about the coronavirus. Recommended, for those who care.
6. “OKZoomer Is a New Dating Service for Quarantined College Kids.”
7. New version of the seen vs. the unseen.
8. Scott Sumner on Herbert Hoover.
9. Five books on plagues and pandemics. By Sarah Skwire.
10. Music streaming is falling because of coronavirus.
11. What is up with coronavirus in Japan? Why so little? Or is it about to strike?
Should Amazon and eBay allow price gouging?
This one has been a big story (NYT):
Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.
The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks.
Colvin ended up giving them away to charity (NYT). More analytically, here are three factors that matter when we consider whether a market-clearing price is better:
1. The traditional maximization of consumer + producer surplus that results from market-clearing prices.
2. People getting pissed off when they see the inequities and supposed inequities of price gouging. That is a real economic loss too, though you have to wonder how much they actually would pay to make the gouging go away (and they might consider such a payment a “price gouge” too!).
3. There are significant social externalities to consumption during a pandemic. So do the market-clearing prices or the rationing algorithms do a better job getting the relevant protective commodities to the most likely super-spreaders? You might think poorer individuals are the most likely super-spreaders, but low prices and queue don’t seem to place the scarce commodities in their hands anyway. Marginal allocation will be by privilege (e.g., do you have friends in China who can send you masks? etc.) if not by income. So I do not see that this factor is going to favor rationing algorithms.
On net, the market-clearing prices are likely to be the better solutions. I also am reluctant to eschew better solutions simply because some people do not like them from a distance, consider Sen on Paretian liberalism.
One interesting feature of this problem is that it points to a potential disadvantage from conglomerates such as Amazon. Masks for instance are a tiny part of Amazon’s revenue. Yet price-gouging on masks can hurt Amazon’s public image a lot. So a fearful Amazon is unlikely to allow the welfare-improving price gouging to continue. The company is too much an agent and too easy a target on social media. That keeps them away from welfare-maximizing, politically incorrect decisions.
Alternatively, imagine you bought masks at a shop that sold nothing else — The Mask Store. Perhaps their reputation rests on having masks always available, but in any case they are not afraid that bad PR will destroy their profits in other lines of business, as there are no other lines of business. So The Mask Shop is more likely to allow prices to reach their market-clearing level.
From the comments, a bailout through credit card receivables?
Accepting the overall premise of Tyler’s Bloomberg column, shouldn’t the government encourage citizens to run up large credit card balances, most of which will become receivables of the major banks, and perhaps even encourage Amazon, Walmart, et. al. to sell goods on their own credit as well like in the old days of dry-goods stores? Then to the extent a massive government bailout is needed, the government can just deal directly with the relatively few Big Businesses that carry those receivables, e.g. by assuming the receivables or subsidizing them.
That is from Nadav.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Covid-19 constrained by climate? And some graphs.
2. The saturation diver (those old service sector jobs).
3. A shutdown plan focusing on travel.
4. A clearinghouse for Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers.
5. “US life expectancy stalls due to cardiovascular disease, not drug deaths.” (!)
6. Steven Hamilton and Stan Veuger one-pager on how to keep business and jobs in proper shape.
7. Coronavirus impact on stock prices and expectations.
8. How to think about unemployment insurance during a pandemic.
“Herd immunity,” time consistency, and the epidemic yoyo
Saloni has long and detailed arguments against herd immunity. Here is Caplan on Hanson. Here is Kling on Hanson. Here is the Taleb critique. Here is the underlying Imperial College paper everyone is talking about. The bottom line is that “locking everyone up to bend the hospital admissions curve” might have to last for at least a year to really choke off the coronavirus.
I’m not going to recap this complex debate, which most of you already have some inkling of. Instead, I’d like to stress the issue of time consistency, noting that I’ll consider some extreme versions of policies to make exposition easier, even though no one advocates exactly those extreme versions.
Let’s say we expose lots of people to the virus rather quickly, to build up herd immunity. Furthermore, we would let commerce and gdp continue to thrive.
Even if that were the very best policy on utilitarian grounds, it might not be time consistent. Once the hospitals start looking like Lombardy, we don’t say “tough tiddlywinks, hail Jeremy Bentham!” Instead we crumble like the complacent softies you always knew we were. We institute quarantines and social distancing and shutdowns and end up with the worst of both worlds.
Alternatively, let’s say we start off being really strict with shutdowns, quarantines, and social distancing. Super-strict, everything closed. For how long can we tolerate the bankruptcies, the unemployment, and the cabin fever? At what point do the small businesspeople, one way or another, violate the orders and resume some form of commercial activity? What about “mitigation fatigue“?
Again, I fear we might switch course and, again, end up with the worst of both worlds. We would take a big hit to gdp but not really stop the spread of the virus.
I also can imagine that we keep switching back and forth. The epidemic yoyo. Because in fact we find none of the scenarios tolerable. Because they are not.
David Brooks postulates another possible form of time inconsistency:
What happens when there are a lot of people who’ve had the disease and become temporarily immune. They start socializing. Social distancing for the rest become harder if not impossible.
Plausible?
I greatly fear the epidemic yoyo. And figuring out how to deal with it may be at least as important as calculating the numerical returns from various consistent policies.
I thank an anonymized correspondent for the term “epidemic yoyo.”
The *Love Letter* has a P.S.
As people start reacting to Covid-19, they are looking mostly to the larger businesses for assistance. Costco and Walmart are packed. Amazon and UPS are delivering our packages. For entertainment at home, Americans are relying on Netflix and the cable companies. For information on Covid-19, Twitter is a very useful stop. As hospitals become overcrowded, CVS and Rite Aid may become important as local health centers and sources of community information.
It turns out that the larger, more profitable businesses are the ones that have the talent, the command of public attention and the financial resources to adjust to these changing conditions.
Big business also has been ahead of the curve when it comes to prediction and adjustment. The NBA postponed its season before most politicians, including the president, realized the gravity of the situation.
Only a month ago, there were headlines mocking Silicon Valley for being overly concerned with Covid-19 and for avoiding handshakes. The tech community had a high degree of advance awareness of Covid-19 problems, and it was ready with telework and other adjustments when the time came. The tech world’s penchant for carrying what seemed to be absurdly large surpluses of cash — last year Apple had over $100 billion in cash reserves — now also seems prescient. Apple’s stores are currently closed in most parts of the world.
And this:
Larger businesses are also easier to assist if necessary. Whatever you think of the forthcoming bailout of the major U.S. airlines, logistically it will not be very difficult to pull off, since the targets are large and obvious and relatively easy to monitor. Banks are willing to lend to them, because they know the government does not contemplate a world without major airlines.
It is much more difficult to bail out the millions of small and medium-sized enterprises around the world that will demand assistance. How do you find and track them? How can you tell which have no chance of bouncing back? Government bureaucracies cannot easily deal with those problems, and in turn private banks do not perceive governments to be making credible commitments to these small businesses. By contrast, there are numerous precedents for governmental aid or loans to airlines or other major businesses.
That is all from my latest Bloomberg column, much more at the link. One problem Italy has, of course, is a fairly high reliance on small business.
Bill Dupor of the St. Louis Fed on fiscal remedies
The entire piece is interesting, here are two highlights:
Subsidize COBRA Continuation Coverage Employer -provided health insurance is commonplacein the United States. Laid off (or furloughed) workers, even if they receive higher UI replacement rates, would (or at least could) lose their health insurance. The federal government already has the COBRA program to allow for continuation of coverage for workers losing their jobs. This program, however, requires worker-paid premiums. These premiums increase the relative cost of engaging in nonmarket activities. To reduce that cost, the federal government might temporarily cover 70 percent of the COBRA premiums for the unemployed or furloughed. Calculating an appropriate size of such a program, even in a rough sense, is difficult at this stage. For a baseline, suppose the allocation were $25 billion, which was the value of a similar program implemented under the 2009 Recovery Act.
And here is another way to get cash into people’s hands quickly:
Penalty-Free Withdrawals from Individual Retirement Accounts
Many Americans hold tax-deferred individual retirement accounts. Individuals can withdraw funds on retirement (and a few other special situations) or any time they wish if they pay a 10 percent penalty. This 10 percent penalty is in addition to the taxes that are due on the withdrawal. In the event of a severe viral outbreak, the federal government could temporarily remove this 10 percent penalty up to a certain dollar amount and for a preset length of time. Since the initial contribution to the retirement fund was tax deferred, taxes would need to be paid on the withdrawal even if the additional penalty was waived.
Recommended.