Results for “pandemic model” 107 found
Does coronavirus mean the end of traditional education?
I will debating/discussing the topic “Does coronavirus mean the end of traditional education?” @ the Cambridge Union. A bit disappointing not to be in the hallowed hall but should be interesting nonetheless. The debate will be live-streamed at 2pm ET on Wednesday.
Will a move towards digital, decentralised teaching transform a model that once seemed so entrenched? Will the loss of exams become permanent for many? In an online panel with the Cambridge Union, four world-renowned figures share their perspective on what the future holds for education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Speakers:
Justine Greening served as Secretary of State for Education under Theresa May, following stints at International Development and Transport. Having left Parliament, Greening now chairs the Social Mobility Pledge.
Stephen Toope is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He previously held the same position at the University of British Columbia, and is perhaps best known for his regular emails to the Cambridge student body.
Alex Tabarrok is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Together with Tyler Cowen, he is best known as the co-founder of Marginal Revolution University, a free online platform for studying economics.
Shirley M. Tilghman was the nineteenth President of Princeton University, serving for twelve years until 2013. She is globally recognised for her scholarship in molecular biology.
Lord David Willetts, former Minister of State for Universities and Science under David Cameron in the UK.
From Lockdown to Liberty
and I have a piece in the Washington Post talking about a Federalist plan to move from lockdown to liberty. You won’t be surprised to learn that it involves testing, testing, testing. I know, you have testing fatigue. So do I. It’s important, however, to not give up on testing too early. We are really only 6-8 weeks into the US crisis and while everyone is frustrated at the slow pace I think we will start to see leaps in capacity soon as major labs come online.
The piece makes two points. First moving too quickly can kill grandma and the economy:
The dangers of reopening without disease control — or a coronavirus vaccine or therapeutic breakthrough — are illustrated by events at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. Smithfield offered workers a bonus if they showed up every day in April. Normally, bonus pay would increase attendance. But in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy.
Second, we need a Federalist approach to testing.
The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.
There is already a bipartisan plan to achieve this; we helped write it. The plan relies on frequent testing followed by tracing the contacts of people who test positive (and their contacts) until no new positive cases are found. It also encourages voluntary isolation, at home or in hotel rooms, to prevent further disease spread. Isolated patients would receive a federal stipend, like jurors, to discourage them from returning to workplaces too soon.
But our plan also recognizes that rural towns in Montana should not necessarily have to shut down the way New York City has. To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and green zones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected. Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations. Green zones require a minimum of one test per day for every 10,000 people and a five-person contact tracing team for every 100,000 people. (These are the levels currently maintained in South Korea, which has suppressed covid-19.)
Most Americans — about 298 million — live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent. But even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks. In South Korea, during the peak of its outbreak, it took 25 tests to detect one positive case, and the case fatality rate was 1 percent. Following this model, yellow zones would require 2,500 tests for every daily death.
…A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones. Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots — which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City. In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders.
One virtue of this plan is that conforms with the common sense of people where they live. People in New York have seen their friends die and understand that stricter rules make sense. People in Montana haven’t seen the crisis up close and so their common sense and our testing strategy require less stringent rules.
We do need testing even in low-prevalence areas, however, and we need to be able to mobilize a lot of testing and tracing quickly to cap flare ups.
One danger of the current situation is that many of the places which have not yet been hit hard by COVID-19 are also the places with the most natural danger as they have lots of elderly with comorbidities.
Read the whole thing.
Addendum: The plan is described in more detail in Pandemic Resilience: Getting it Done. A live map of the US and how different places are faring is here and the COVID vulnerability index is here.
Friday assorted links
1. Did the dual-career model peak in the mid-1990s?
2. Long summit on vaccines, long video, many top names represented.
3. List of possible coronavirus benefits?
4. Notes on the dynamics of subsequent epidemic waves.
5. Tokyo deaths do not seem to be up. What is the best model for this?
6. What is school in Denmark looking like these days?
7. David Beckworth on the ngdp gap.
8. Budget allocation cuts going to higher ed appear to be brutal. Again, the “free college” idea is a complete non-starter.
10. NYT covers Navy reports of UFOs, and no they’re not just a few simple, repeated optical illusions like maybe you saw in that YouTube video, for instance radar evidence too.
Did we lockdown some parts of America too early?
No, I am not referring to the preventive measures taken in California, Washington state, and parts of the Tri-state area. Those made good sense to me at the time and in retrospect all the more.
I mean when the whole country started to shut down, including the South, Midwest, and other parts of the West. And yes I know the legal lockdowns were not always the biggest factors, arguably it was when governments started scaring people.
Let’s say you have a simple model of political sustainability where Americans will tolerate [???] months of lockdown — shall we say two? — but not much more. (Maybe three months if we had Merkel as president.) Then, if you scare/lock down in parts of the country where the virus is not yet evident, you create economic misery but not many public health gains. Who after all thinks that Seattle should have been locked down last September? Right?
Many parts of America now hate the lockdown, as they see the economic devastation, are not witnessing overloaded hospital systems, and just don’t quite “get it.” And they are now taking off the lockdown, through both legal and informal means, before it is optimal to do so. One loyal MR reader emailed me this:
The smaller town I am in was never hit hard, and therefore most people are somewhere on the spectrum between COVID is a bad flu and you should wash your hands to pick whatever conspiracy theory (plandemic). People do not believe in the severity of the virus. Not one family we know is social distancing. The ICU never got overrun, the only apocalypse to arrive is an economic one. This is the fundamental point. Most people’s only pain and sadness stems from loss of job, security, future NOT from sickness and death. People here don’t work for big companies or the government.
Oddly, Trump’s big speech when he found “pandemic religion” may have been one of his biggest mistakes. I fully understand that Denmark and Austria did well because they locked down early (and took other measures). There is good evidence that NYC should have locked down earlier yet, but maybe (and I do mean maybe) other parts of the country — most of all rural America — should have locked down later, so they would have their lockdown active “when it really matters.”
In the meantime, we could have restricted or somehow taxed travel out of NYC, which seems to have been a major national spreader.
This is one reason why I am skeptical about models of epidemiology (and economics!) that do not consider political sustainability. I am by no means sure that the claims in this post are correct, but they could be correct. And a model that does not consider political sustainability and time consistency won’t even pick up these factors as concerns. It will simply indicate that a lockdown should happen as quickly as possible. But that was perhaps one of our big mistakes, namely to shut down many of the less dense parts of America before their problems were sufficiently acute, thereby rendering the whole program less sustainable.
And moralizing and blaming our current predicament on “Trump,” or “the yahoos who watch Fox News” is — even if correct — washing one’s hands of the responsibility to incorporate political sustainability into the model.
I fully admit, by the way, that I did not myself appreciate the import of this factor at the time. This is all a sign of how backward our science is in this entire area.
By the way, here is a 55 pp. Powerpoint-like survey of lockdown models. Many references, not much public choice or political economy to be seen.
Facts about labor markets ouch, when are rising wages bad edition
Workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution experienced a 35 percent employment decline while those in the top quintile experienced only a 9 percent decline. Large differences across the wage distribution persist even after conditioning on worker age, business industry, business size, and worker location. As a result, average base wages increased by over 5 percent, though this increase arose entirely through a composition effect. Overall, we document that the speed and magnitude of labor market deterioration during the early parts of the pandemic were unprecedented in the postwar period, particularly for the bottom of the earnings distribution.
That is from a new paper by many authors, including Cajner, Decker, and Hurst. Via Adam Ozimek.
America’s reopening will depend on trust
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic brought serious economic damage for thinly capitalized face-to-face retailers, such as small family-owned restaurants. But many of those same institutions will lead the recovery — that is, if they have built up trust among their patrons. If they ask me to sit outside to eat my meal, I will trust that their kitchen procedures are “clean enough,” because I believe that the boss is watching [there I am referring to two of my favorite local places].
It is also worth asking whom I do not trust. When it comes to providing a fully clean and safe store, I do not trust most of the big-box retailers. I trust them just fine in ordinary times, but no single manager can oversee the entire cleaning and disinfectant operation. And can they monitor Covid-19 in the air? If they tell me that “all possible precautions have been taken,” I might believe their words, but I won’t believe that is enough.
And:
The NBA is wondering if it can resurrect its playoffs at a dedicated location with television coverage but no audience in the stands. So far the teams are hesitant, in part because they are afraid of public resentment if the league’s millionaire players have access to Covid-19 tests while the general public does not.
The reality is that if the NBA announced it was buying up a lot of tests, it would boost the supply of tests. That could provide testing with valuable positive publicity, with the NBA serving as a role model for what other businesses might do. Yet the NBA does not yet trust its fans to see things in such a positive light, and so reopening is delayed. There might be some danger to playoffs games without fans, but surely less than in, say, collegiate or professional football, where injuries and concussions are built into the very nature of the competition.
Which are the businesses that you really trust in matters pandemic?
Save Grandma, Save the Economy
The meat supply is starting to fail. Meat processing factories seem especially susceptible to COVID-19 probably because of mist, chilled air circulation, the creation of aerosols and close worker contact. What other industries could be affected? What would happen if the energy, transportation, or pharmaceutical sector failed? We aren’t even sure which industries are critical. Who would have thought that nasal swabs would be a critical industry? In researching vaccine production I was stunned to learn that glass vials may be a bottleneck. Glass vials! How then do we best protect the workers in our critical industries? Should everyone else practice social distancing, closing of non-essential firms and work from home or should everyone else return to work as if everything were normal?
Social distancing, closing non-essential firms and working from home protect the vulnerable but these same practices protect workers in critical industries. Thus, the debate between protecting the vulnerable and protecting the economy is moot. “Lockdowns” protect vulnerable people and protect vulnerable industries. Save grandma, save the economy.
The point is simple but made formally in Social Distancing and Supply Disruptions in a Pandemic by Bodenstein, Corsetti and Guerrieri.
Abstract: Drastic public health measures such as social distancing or lockdowns can reduce the loss of human life by keeping the number of infected individuals from exceeding the capacity of the health care system but are often criticized because of the social and economic costs they entail. We question this view by combining an epidemiological model, calibrated to capture the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with a multisector model, designed to capture key characteristics of the U.S. Input Output Tables. Our two-sector model features a core sector that produces intermediate inputs not easily replaced by inputs from the other sector, subject to minimum-scale requirements. We show that, by affecting workers in this core sector, the high peak of an infection not mitigated by social distancing may cause very large upfront economic costs in terms of output, consumption and investment. Social distancing measures can reduce these costs, especially if skewed towards non-core industries and occupations with tasks that can be performed from home, helping to smooth the surge in infections among workers in the core sector.
Addendum: I wrote “lockdowns” because I am in favor of getting back to work with mass testing and safety protocols so I don’t think that a “lockdown” is necessarily the optimal policy. Indeed, I think we could get the meat processors back up and running with testing at the door and safety protocols. But we are not having a rational discussion about the tools and the investments that we need to reopen the economy. Instead, the people protesting to reopen the economy are also protesting against the use of a key tool to reopen the economy, masks! Welcome to crazy town.
Should South Africa lock down?
The lockdown will lead to 29 times more lives lost than the harm it seeks to prevent from Covid-19 in SA, according to a conservative estimate contained in a new model developed by local actuaries.
The model, which will be made public today for debate, was developed by a consortium calling itself Panda (Pandemic ~ Data Analysis), which includes four actuaries, an economist and a doctor, while the work was checked by lawyers and mathematicians. The process was led by two fellows at the Actuarial Society of SA, Peter Castleden and Nick Hudson.
They have sent a letter, explaining its model, to President Cyril Ramaphosa. In the letter, headed “Lockdown is a humanitarian disaster to dwarf Covid-19”, they call for an end to the lockdown, a focus on isolating the elderly and allowing children to go back to school, while ensuring the economy restarts so that lives can be saved.
The paper also is at the link, and it is perhaps more of a rough and ready calculation than a formal model per se. Nonetheless South Africa has a relatively young population and the core points are well taken:
In SA, they estimate that 5.4 years of life have been lost per Covid-19 death. They then multiply this by the range of deaths which they predict – 20,000 – as well as the actuarial society’s prediction of 88,000 fatalities. They factor in that the lockdown will have reduced some deaths, but not all. In the end, their model translated into a minimum of 26,800 “years of lives lost” due to Covid-19, and a maximum of 473,500 years. (This, critically, shouldn’t be confused with the actual number of fatalities expected from Covid-19.)
The actuaries then used the figures predicted by the National Treasury to model the impact on poverty. On Friday, the Treasury estimated that between 3-million and 7-million jobs will be lost due to the measures taken to combat the virus. The actuaries then work out that, conservatively, 10% of South Africans will become poorer, and as a result, will lose a few months of their lives.
It is a good question how many of the models used for the West have taken into account the “demonstration effect,” namely that poorer (and much younger) countries will be tempted to follow the same policies. I’ve yet to see a good discussion of this.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The problem with Covid-19 and immunity?
2. Podcast with Marc Lipsitch. And Unherd interview with a German virologist (have not heard yet).
3. Excellent FT piece on liability issues.
4. The multiple virus strains hypothesis reemerges, caveat lector, please don’t get too carried away with this one, but worth a ponder. And here is a WaPo piece on the surrounding debate.
5. When will cancelled sailings impact U.S. ports?
6. Henry Farrell on what the public wants.
7. Are the Swedes epidemiological nationalists? (Might others be too?) And I don’t understand this Peter Turchin post on Denmark vs. Sweden, but maybe you will?
8. How the debate about herd immunity should proceed.
9. Model this (Australian camel plunge, multi-camel plunge in fact).
10. How much contact is required for transmission?
11. How do the CRISPR tests for Covid-19 work? (pretty amazing stuff).
12. Are panviral defenses a real option? (NYT)
13. The Quebec plan for school reopening — feasible or not?
Online Education is Better
The COVID-19 crisis is accelerating a long-term trend, the shift to online education. I’ve long argued that online education is superior to traditional models. In an excellent essay in the New York Times, Veronique Mintz, an eighth-grade NYC student agrees:
Talking out of turn. Destroying classroom materials. Disrespecting teachers. Blurting out answers during tests. Students pushing, kicking, hitting one another and even rolling on the ground. This is what happens in my school every single day.
You may think I’m joking, but I swear I’m not…during my three years of middle school, these sorts of disruptions occurred repeatedly in any given 42-minute class period.
That’s why I’m in favor of the distance learning the New York City school system instituted when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
…Distance learning gives me more control of my studies. I can focus more time on subjects that require greater effort and study. I don’t have to sit through a teacher fielding questions that have already been answered.
…This year I have struggled with math. The teacher rarely had the patience for questions as he spent at least a third of class time trying to maintain order. Often, when I scheduled time to meet with him before school, there would be a pileup at his door of students who also had questions. He couldn’t help us all in 20 minutes before first period. Other times he just wouldn’t show up….With distance learning, all of that wasted time is eliminated. I stop, start and even rewind the teacher’s recording when I need to and am able to understand the lesson on the day it’s taught.
Veronique’s online courses were put together in a rush. Imagine how much more she will learn when we invest millions in online classes and teach at scale. The online classes that Tyler and I teach, using Modern Principles and the Sapling/Achieve online course management system, took years to produce and feature high quality videos and sophisticated assessment tools including curve shifting (not just multiple-choice), empirical questions based on FRED, and adaptive practice–plus the videos are all subtitled in multiple languages, they can be sped up or slowed down, watched at different times of the day in different time zones and so forth. Moreover, technology is increasing the advantages of online education over time.
What is non-optimal about current sorting?
In club theory, clubs have congestion costs and charge fees, in part to reflect those costs. If there are enough clubs, or non-convexities are not too severe, the voluntary outcome is roughly optimal.
So why then are guidelines for social distancing needed? Why can’t we just let consumers decide to stay away from stores or other venues that might be too dangerous?
The problem with pandemics is that congestion costs are endogenous, and not fixed as in the simple club models. If you get infected, congestion costs rise, and entry fees rise, increasing both congestion and exclusion (shut stores as one symptom of exclusion), both reducing the welfare of others. Individuals do not take those costs into account when deciding their risk of exposure.
Saturday assorted links
1. Are the turning points of epidemics intrinsically unpredictable?
2. An increasing number of state governments are seizing unused gift cards as unclaimed property.
3. How much do work-related visitors predict coronavirus spread?
4. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Charles I. Jones now have a Covid-19 deaths tracker, very useful.
5. Six Covid-related deregulations to watch.
6. The variety of college plans.
7. Innate immunology? (NYT)
8. Deepak Lal has passed away.
9. A rogue pandemic view, speculative. And Kelsey Piper on the IHME model, recommended.
10. Meara O’Reilly, Hockets for Two Voices, short distraction, by the way she is the daughter of Tim O’Reilly.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Revised look at IHME epidemiological predictions. And public code for the Imperial College model.
2. Very good Derek Thompson piece on the evolution of retail (Atlantic).
3. Pandemic urbanism bibliography.
4. Mulligan, Murphy, and Topel on Covid-related issues. They think like economists.
5. The role of different occupations in transmitting Covid-19.
6. Osterholm and Olshaker on testing, good piece (NYT).
7. Coronavirus spreading in Africa more slowly than expected (FT but not gated).
8. Forced isolation.
Early detection of superspreaders by mass group pool testing
Most of epidemiological models applied for COVID-19 do not consider heterogeneity in infectiousness and impact of superspreaders, despite the broad viral loading distributions amongst COVID-19 positive people (1-1 000 000 per mL). Also, mass group testing is not used regardless to existing shortage of tests. I propose new strategy for early detection of superspreaders with reasonable number of RT-PCR tests, which can dramatically mitigate development COVID-19 pandemic and even turn it endemic. Methods I used stochastic social-epidemiological SEIAR model, where S-suspected, E-exposed, I-infectious, A-admitted (confirmed COVID-19 positive, who are admitted to hospital or completely isolated), R-recovered. The model was applied to real COVID-19 dynamics in London, Moscow and New York City. Findings Viral loading data measured by RT-PCR were fitted by broad log-normal distribution, which governed high importance of superspreaders. The proposed full scale model of a metropolis shows that top 10% spreaders (100+ higher viral loading than median infector) transmit 45% of new cases. Rapid isolation of superspreaders leads to 4-8 fold mitigation of pandemic depending on applied quarantine strength and amount of currently infected people. High viral loading allows efficient group matrix pool testing of population focused on detection of the superspreaders requiring remarkably small amount of tests. Interpretation The model and new testing strategy may prevent thousand or millions COVID-19 deaths requiring just about 5000 daily RT-PCR test for big 12 million city such as Moscow.
Speculative, but I believe this is the future of our war against Covid-19.
The paper is by
Social distancing should never be too restrictive
That is the topic of a new paper by Farboodi, Jarosch, and Shimer, published version in here. They favor ” Immediate social distancing that ends only slowly but is not overly restrictive.” Furthermore, they test the model against data from Safegraph and also from Sweden and find that their recommendations do not depend very much on parameter values.
Here is an excerpt from the paper:
…social distancing is never too restrictive. At any point in time, the effective reproduction number for a disease is the expected number of people that an infected person infects. In contrast to the basic reproduction number, it accounts for the current level of social activity and the fraction of people who are susceptible. Importantly, optimal policy keeps the effective reproduction number above the fraction of people who are susceptible,although for a long time only mildly so. That is, social activity is such that, if almost everyone were susceptible to the disease, the disease would grow over time. That means that optimal social activity lets infections grow until the susceptible population is sufficiently small that the number of infected people starts to shrink. As the stock of infected individuals falls,the optimal ratio of the effective reproduction number to the fraction of susceptible people grows until it eventually converges to the basic reproduction number.
To understand why social distancing is never too restrictive, first observe that social activity optimally returns to its pre-pandemic level in the long run, even if a cure is never found. To understand why, suppose to the contrary that social distancing is permanently imposed, suppressing social activity below the first-best (disease-free world) level. That means that a small increase in social activity has a first-order impact on welfare. Of course, there is a cost to increasing social activity: it will lead to an increase in infections. However,since the number of infected people must converge to zero in the long run, by waiting long enough to increase social activity, the number of additional infections can be made arbitrarily small while the benefit from a marginal increase in social activity remains positive.
Recommended, one recurring theme is that people distance a lot of their own accord. That means voluntary self-policing brings many of the benefits of a lockdown. Another lesson is that we should be liberalizing at the margin.
If I have a worry, however, it has to do with the Lucas critique. People make take preliminary warnings very seriously, when they see those warnings are part of a path toward greater strictness. When the same verbal or written message is part of a path toward greater liberalization however…perhaps the momentum and perceived end point really matters?
For the pointer I thank John Alcorn.