Results for “Test prep” 185 found
Friday assorted links
1. Scott Alexander reviews Toby Ord’s The Precipice, about existential risk.
3. A critique of the Paycheck Protection Program — it might help already stable restaurants the most. See also this tweet storm.
4. Should we pivot to a service trade agenda?
5. Full paper assessing health care capacity in India.
6. Claims about Covid and the future economics of cultural institutions.
7. I could link to Matt Levine every day, but do read this one on liquidity transformation.
8. How is the cloud holding up? A good post.
9. Immunity segregation comes to Great Britain.
10. Robin Hanson on the variance in R0 and how hard it is to halt the spread of the virus.
11. New program for on-line “Night Owls” philosophy by Agnes Callard.
12. The true story of the toilet paper shortage: it’s not about hoarding, rather a shift of demand away from the commercial sector into the household sector (you are doing more “business” at home these days).
13. “U.S. ALCOHOL SALES INCREASE 55 PERCENT IN ONE WEEK AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC.”
14. Fan, Jamison, and Larry Summers 2016 paper on the economics of a pandemic. I wrote at the end of the blog post: “In other words, in expected value terms an influenza pandemic is a big problem indeed. But since, unlike global warming, it does not fit conveniently into the usual social status battles which define our politics, it receives far less attention.”
15. Buying masks from China just got tougher.
16. How to produce greater capacity flexibility for hospitals.
Thursday assorted links
1. Haircuts for airlines. And time to prepare for voting by mail.
2. David Piling (FT) wonders whether India and Africa should do full lockdown.
3. Redundancy, not reshoring, is the key to supply chain security.
4. “Our classification implies that 34 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home.”
5. Why was it so hard to raise the coronavirus alarm? (the yappers are one reason, btw — are you one of them?)
6. Under these calculations, an average coronavirus death in China means 11 years lost, 16 years lost in the United States.
8. Are the new testing kits going to be sent to the American South, which has fewer measured cases? Where should they be sent? A good piece.
9. Economist Eric Budish on viewing R less than 1 as a fundamental economic constraint.
10. Overnight, Magnus Carlsen just revolutionized the future organization of chess play. This will become the new normal.
11. Social distancing tips from a hermit. “Keep track of something” is a good one.
12. How are the Amish adapting to shuttered schools?
13. Marginal Revolution University landing page for economic resources on coronavirus.
Wednesday assorted links
2. Timeline of the federal government response to coronavirus.
3. Anti-price gouging laws mean masks leave America, I wonder if Alex is preparing a whole post on this link?
4. Holman Jenkins of the WSJ goes Straussian on the Straussian bloggers.
5. The culture that is Bengali priorities: sweet shops will stay open. And a short history of coronavirus in Japan. And Ezra Klein interviews Evan Osnos on coronavirus and U.S.-China relations.
6. Self-isolation proves a boon to rainfall project.
7. Why there are lags in scaling up California testing. A very good (and depressing) piece.
8. Mossad officer describes their battle for ventilators. And is the U.S. taking ventilators from Paraguay? (speculative)
9. The singing stops in southern Italy as tensions rise.
10. “Our infectiousness model suggests that the total contribution to R0 from pre-symptomatics is 0.9 (0.2 – 1.1), almost enough to sustain an epidemic on its own. For SARS, the corresponding estimate was almost zero (9), immediately telling us that different containment strategies will be needed for COVID-19.” Link here.
11. Hospitals that won’t let their doctors wear masks (NYT).
12. Economist Peter Sinclair has died from Covid-19.
13. Should very young countries such as Nigeria opt for suppression?
15. Our system of scientific funding is broken for rapid science (recommended).
Thursday assorted links
1. Less Wrong coronavirus database (now upgraded).
2. My 2017 video on The Great Reset. And David Wright podcast on how Covid hits the poor.
3. MIE: In Beijing restaurants “many delivery orders now often include cards listing the names and temperatures of all the staff involved in preparing your food.”
4. The limits of infrastructure stimulus. And the case against airline bailouts. And database of state quarantine regulations.
5. Paul Romer’s simulations for tests and targeted isolation. And more from Romer. And a third Paul Romer simulation: even an eighty percent false negative rate helps fight a pandemic. I’ll be writing more on this soon.
6. Health and pandemics econ working group. And Senegalese music video.
8. Cheap mechanical ventilators?
9. Someone wise once told me that you get into the most trouble/controversy making statements that (pretty much) everyone agrees with. Here is my Bloomberg column on university endowments, which endorses the policies of virtually all elite universities, and by extension their presidents and boards. Or for that matter virtually all businesses that have had to opt for lay-offs.
10. The problems of post-acute care.
11. During the shutdown, the creativity pours forth (Joseph’s Machines).
Shruti Rajagopalan on India and the coronavirus
Overall, a lockdown in India is a good idea. Its healthcare infrastructure cannot handle even the flattest of curves, so social distancing not only flattens the curve but buys the government and private sector three weeks to increase capacity. In developed countries like the US, where capacity is high, the economic cost of shutdown is also high. But in India, the economic cost of a shutdown is lower, and the cost of a collapse in healthcare capacity because of premature stress is very high. So a lockdown in India makes sense for its conditions.
There are a few things to keep in mind to make this lockdown a success.
First, the Indian government needs to rely on its private sector healthcare infrastructure, which is many times larger in capacity and services than the government provided free/subsidized healthcare. There are 10 times more doctors in India working in the private sector than government hospitals. Especially in urban areas – where the initial outbreaks are most expected and feared – private healthcare functions very well. The government should pay for the testing and treatment of the poor and those who cannot afford, and allow those who can pay to directly get those services. During emergencies, there is a temptation to requisition private capacity, which in this case will only impose stress on the healthcare infrastructure. The government should pump a lot of funds into the health sector, but allow the private sector to provision and increase the number of beds, health workers, ventilators, masks etc. The current allocation of 150 billion rupees (about 2 billion USD) announced by Modi is too little. It’s about $1.5 per Indian. This amount needs to be increased many times over. The returns in terms of saving lives immediately, and improving healthcare infrastructure will be worth it in the long term.
Second, the government must resist the temptation to impose price controls and quantity controls and let the markets work. India has very local supply chains and all essential goods, mainly food and dairy, will be available easily. Price controls during a lockdown will only exacerbate the problem. A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive. It signals shortages and surpluses and it also incentivizes buyers and sellers to adjust their behavior. Government imposed price controls must be avoided completely. India has banned exports of medical essentials like masks and ventilators, which is currently justified and sufficient. Indian entrepreneurs will respond to the emergency if prices are allowed to function and the dreaded Essential Commodities Act, which has significantly distorted prices in the past, and unintentionally prevented essential goods from reaching people, is kept at bay.
Third, India has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but still has about 275 million living below the poverty line i.e. less than $1.25 a day. In addition to these, another 300 million are highly vulnerable to economic stress. 70% of Indians work in the informal sector, on short contracts, usually daily or weekly wage, and will have no income with a 21-day lockdown. Even after the lockdown is lifted, sectors like construction may not revive immediately. India needs to announce some kind of quasi universal income, or subsidy that is not means tested, for at least 700 million of
its 1.35 billion population. A minimum of at least Rs 2,500 a month (which is the Indian poverty line) to keep these Indians at home, and not desperate, is essential. If this has to be continued for three months, it would amount to ~2.6% of GDP. This is a stimulus which India can, under these circumstances, afford, and without which millions of poor may die because of the lockdown and not the pandemic. Without this, the chances of the success of the lockdown is low. It will also soften the aggregate demand contraction which is inevitable during a 21 day lockdown.
Finally, assume goodwill. There is a tendency to pass draconian measures in an emergency to punish the few hoarders and scamsters in any situation. The problem with bad laws that are only designed to prevent scamsters, whether it is for hospital funding, UBI-like subsidies, or removing price controls, is that it creates bad incentives for others, and discourages provisioning of goods and services by others, mostly operating on good faith. And the cost of punishing the scamsters in this emergency is too high. Assume some small percentage of people will take advantage of all this, and carry on.
The lockdown is the first step. But India must not squander the next 21 days, and prepare on a war footing to increase its healthcare infrastructure.
Saturday assorted links
1. A thread on the economics of Covid vaccines. Good stuff.
2. The cultural foundations of democracy. Not about Covid, but interesting.
3. Philosophical resources on pandemics.
5. Ben Domenech predictions for post-corona life.
6. Alec Stapp on what exactly went wrong with testing. “There have been three major regulatory barriers so far to scaling up testing by public labs and private companies: 1) obtaining an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA); 2) being certified to perform high-complexity testing consistent with requirements under Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA); and 3) complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule and the Common Rule related to the protection of human research subjects.”
7. New data source for estimating the number of U.S. tests.
8. Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl on the Taiwanese success.
9. European nations are mobilizing their medical students.
10. Should a positive Covid-19 test be an OSHA-recordable illness? (No.)
11. New calibrated estimates, possibly important, no paper but with NYT graphics. One implication is that already far more people have it than we had thought.
Mercatus call for short papers
Today, the Mercatus Center put out a call for policy briefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope to gather short, actionable analyses for decision makers in the public, civil society, and private sectors regarding both immediate response (what’s working or could be done immediately), as well as in the medium term (what do we need to be thinking about now so that we’re prepared in six to twelve months).
More information can be found here.
Papers will be published quickly (within 24 hours in most cases), and authors will receive a $1,000 honorarium.
The list of possible topics is advisory and by no means comprehensive; our goal is to assemble the smartest actionable analyses as quickly as possible.
Hedgehogs in particular: what do you know here that the foxes should hear?
Note that research need not directly relate to public policy, but also how the business sector and civil society can and should respond.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Extremely strong claims of intracellular neuronal computation.
4. Does long hair belong in a clinical setting? How about traveling with liquid hand sanitizer?
5. We need new legal protections that make it easier to discharge patients from hospitals.
6. Behavioral fatigue and social distancing.
7. Where testing stands. The best and most thorough look I have seen at that question.
8. “TikTok Told Moderators to Suppress Posts by ‘Ugly’ People and the Poor to Attract New Users”
9. Podcast with Kyle Harper on pandemics in Roman history.
10. An optimistic Israeli case that R0 will fall faster than we think.
11. Susan Athey and Dean Karlan on how to soften the blow on your local economy.
12. By a modest margin, voters approve of Trump’s handling of the crisis.
13. Dube’s unemployment insurance plan.
Sorry for so many links, but they are all worthy.
The FDA and Coronavirus
The failure of the FDA/CDC to adequately prepare for coronavirus, despite weeks of advance notice from China is one of the most shocking and serious examples of government failure that I have seen in my lifetime. After being prevented from doing so, private laboratories are now allowed to offer coronavirus tests and Bill and Melinda Gates’s Foundation is working on an at home swab and test.
But what happens when people get sick? What drugs will patients be allowed to try given that there is no standard treatment available? One experimental antiviral, Remdesivir, was given to the first US patient who was on a downward spiral but seemed to recover after receiving the drug. Gilead, the manufacturer says:
Remdesivir is not yet licensed or approved anywhere globally and has not been demonstrated to be safe or effective for any use. At the request of treating physicians, and with the support of local regulatory agencies, who have weighed the risks and benefits of providing an experimental drug with no data in 2019-nCoV, Gilead has provided remdesivir for use in a small number of patients with 2019-nCoV for emergency treatment in the absence of any approved treatment options.
If Gilead is willing to supply, should patients have a right to try? This seems like a good case for the dual tracking approach proposed by Bartley Madden–let patients try unapproved drugs but collect all information in a public database for analysis. Clinical trials for Remdesivir and other potential drugs are currently underway in China.
Chloroquine, might also be useful against Covid-19. Chloroquine was approved long ago to treat malaria and physicians are allowed to prescribe old drugs for new uses. New uses for old drugs are discovered all the time and they do not have to go through long and costly FDA approval procedures before being prescribed for the new uses. Since chloroquine has never been tested for efficacy against coronovirus, allowing physicians to prescribe it is similar to allowing physicians to prescribe an unapproved drug like Remdesivir. The difference in how new drugs and old drugs for new uses are treated is something of a regulatory anomaly but a fortunate one as I argue in my paper on off-label prescribing.
I suspect that my arguments for less FDA regulation will be relatively well received during the current climate of fear. Bear in mind, however, that for the patient who is dying it’s always an emergency.
Hat tip: Balaji Srinivasan, who really would make a great FDA commissioner.
The WHO Report on COVID-19
The Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the best source of information on COVID-19 that I have seen.
The Joint Mission consisted of 25 national and international experts from China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, the United States of America and the World Health Organization (WHO). The Joint Mission was headed by Dr Bruce Aylward of WHO and Dr Wannian Liang of the People’s Republic of China.
Some of the language is more pro-China than is usual in an academic report but the report is full of credible data.
The bottom line is that there is good news and bad news. The good news is that due to extraordinary intervention the epidemic in China has been brought under control and is slowing to manageable levels.
In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. The strategy that underpinned this containment effort was initially a national approach that promoted universal temperature monitoring, masking, and hand washing. However, as the outbreak evolved, and knowledge was gained, a science and risk-based approach was taken to tailor implementation. Specific containment measures were adjusted to the provincial, county and even community context, the capacity of the setting, and the nature of novel coronavirus transmission there.
…. China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. A particularly compelling statistic is that on the first day of the advance team’s work there were 2478 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in China. Two weeks later, on the final day of this Mission, China reported 409 newly confirmed cases. This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real.
… Based on a comparison of crude attack rates across provinces, the Joint Mission estimates that this truly all-of Government and all-of-society approach that has been taken in China has averted or at least delayed hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 cases in the country. By extension, the reduction that has been achieved in the force of COVID-19 infection in China has also played a significant role in protecting the global community and creating a stronger first line of defense against international spread. Containing this outbreak, however, has come at great cost and sacrifice by China and its people, in both human and material terms.
The bad news is that the WHO is worried that other countries do not have the capability or will to implement some of the same policies as China did.
Much of the global community is not yet ready, in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China. These are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans. Fundamental to these measures is extremely proactive surveillance to immediately detect cases, very rapid diagnosis and immediate case isolation, rigorous tracking and quarantine of close contacts, and an exceptionally high degree of population understanding and acceptance of these measures.
.. COVID-19 is spreading with astonishing speed; COVID-19 outbreaks in any setting have very serious consequences; and there is now strong evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce and even interrupt transmission. Concerningly, global and national preparedness planning is often ambivalent about such interventions. However, to reduce COVID-19 illness and death, near-term readiness planning must embrace the large-scale implementation of high-quality, non-pharmaceutical public health measures. These measures must fully incorporate immediate case detection and isolation, rigorous close contact tracing and monitoring/quarantine, and direct population/community engagement.
I don’t think the WHO is the final authority on what to do, public health is their hammer. I have been dismayed, however, at the failure of the CDC, which surely prior to this crisis one would have rated as one of the best US organizations. As the NYTimes wrote:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic test kit, a discovery made only after officials had shipped hundreds of kits to state laboratories.
A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses. And the C.D.C. essentially ensured that Americans would be tested in very few numbers by imposing stringent and narrow criteria, critics say.
The failure of the CDC, which is a failure of the US government at the deepest levels, not just rot from the top, meant that we lost several weeks that we may have needed to avoid more stringent measures. We will know more in a week.
Read the whole thing.
Most Popular Posts of 2019
Here are the top MR posts for 2019, as measured by landing pages. The most popular post was Tyler’s
1. How I practice at what I do
Alas, I don’t think that will help to create more Tylers. Coming in at number two was my post:
2. What is the Probability of a Nuclear War?
Other posts in the top five were 3. Pretty stunning data on dating from Tyler and my posts, 4. One of the Greatest Environmental Crimes of the 20th Century,and 5. The NYTimes is Woke.
My post on The Baumol Effect which introduced my new book Why are the Prices So Damned High (one of Mercatus’s most downloaded items ever) was number 6 and rounding out the top ten were a bunch from Tyler, including 7. Has anyone said this yet?, 8. What is wrong with social justice warriors?, 9. Reading and rabbit holes and my post Is Elon Musk Prepping for State Failure?.
Other big hits from me included
- Air Pollution Reduces IQ, a Lot (Mostly a Patrick Collison post)
- The Nobel Prize in Economic Science Goes to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer
- Bitcoin is Less Secure than Most People Think
- Active Learning Works But Students Don’t Like It
- Sex Differences in Personality are Large and Important
Tyler had some truly great posts in the last few days of 2019 including what I thought was the post of the year (and not just on MR!) Work on these things.
Also important were:
- “What will you do to stay weird?”
- Joker
- Amazon and Taxes a Simple Primer
- Best Non-fiction books of 2019.
Happy holidays everyone!
Conversations with Tyler, year-end retrospective
The show’s producer, the excellent Jeff Holmes, interviews me about what I thought of the year’s episodes (including most underrated), here is the audio and transcript, a very fun episode for me to do. We cover:
…who was most challenging guest to prep for, the most popular — and the most underrated — conversation, a test of Tyler’s knowledge called “Name That Production Function,” listener questions from Twitter, how Tyler has boosted his productivity in the past year, and whether his book and movie picks from 2009 still hold up.
And if you have enjoyed this year in Conversations, please consider donating here before the end of the year.
Has a more beautiful “Progress Studies” book introduction ever been written?
On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister Karl Friedrich von Eichorn received a request from a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. By the time their statutes were approved in March, they numbered forty-nine and were meeting biweekly to discuss the latest developments in the physical sciences and physiology. They were preparing to write critical reviews for a new journal, Die Fortschritte der Physik (Advances in physics), and from the beginning they set out to define what constituted progress and what did not. Their success in this rather aggressive endeavor has long fascinated historians of science. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small group established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of physical science populated by large institutes and laboratories of experiment and precision measurement.
How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings, without position or recognition, and possessed of little more than their outsized confidence and ambition, succeed in seizing the future? What were their resources?
That is the opening passage from M. Norton Wise, Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society.
Thursday assorted links
1. Is an auto-renewed lottery ticket purchase still fun? (The polity that is Virginia)
2. The Great Stagnation, genomics edition.
3. How nuclear war with Russia might start.
4. More debunking of the Stanford prison experiment.
5. Yiyun Li on Toni Morrison (NYT).
Monday assorted links
1. The commercialization of cornhole.
2. Argentina interview (in Spanish).
3. China and North Korea (NYT).
4. Robert Kaplan on China and other stuff.
5. “This study uses an experimental design to explore how people react to criminal stigma in the context of online dating…White females disclosing parole matched at a higher rate than White females not disclosing parole.” Link here.
6. Is Amazon getting worse at bookselling? (NYT)