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Ocean Grove, New Jersey travel notes

Having not visited the New Jersey shore since I was a kid (and then a very regular visitor), I realized you cannot actually swim there with any great facility.  Nor is there much to do, nor should one look forward to the food.

Nonetheless Ocean Grove is one of America’s finest collections of Victorian homes, and the town style is remarkably consistent and intact.  Most of all, it is an “only in America” kind of place:

Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 as an outgrowth of the camp meeting movement in the United States, when a group of Methodist clergymen, led by William B. Osborn and Ellwood H. Stokes, formed the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to develop and operate a summer camp meeting site on the New Jersey seashore. By the early 20th century, the popular Christian meeting ground became known as the “Queen of Religious Resorts.” The community’s land is still owned by the camp meeting association and leased to individual homeowners and businesses. Ocean Grove remains the longest-active camp meeting site in the United States.

The pipe organ in the 19th century Auditorium is still one of the world’s twenty largest.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey - Wikipedia

The Auditorium is closed at the moment, but they still sing gospel music on the boardwalk several times a night.

The police department building is merged together with a Methodist church, separate entrances but both under the same roof.

Ocean Grove remains a fully dry city, for the purpose of “keeping the riff-raff out,” as one waitress explained to me.  To walk up the Ocean Grove boardwalk into nearby Asbury Park (Cuban and Puerto Rican and Haitian in addition to American black) remains a lesson in the economics of sudden segregation, deliberate and otherwise.

Based on my experience as a kid, I recall quite distinct “personae” for the adjacent beach towns of Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Seaside Heights, Lavalette, Belmar, Spring Lake, and Point Pleasant.  This time around I did not see much cultural convergence.  That said, Ocean Grove now seems less the province of the elderly and more of a quiet upscale haunt, including for gay couples.  As an eight-year-old, it was my least favorite beach town on the strip.  Fifty years later, it is now striking to me how much the United States is refusing to be all smoothed over and homogenized.

Saturday assorted links

1. Update on the Colorado drone swarms — it seems not the military.

2. History blog written by a sixth grader.

3. Couples meet less and less in college.

4. AI version of a CWT with Paul Graham.

5. Uzbekistan offers $3000 to visitors (from low-risk countries) who contract Covid there.

6. “Chinese writers in interviews usually reference Dickens and Tolstoy and Carver more often than they reference their peers.

7. More new T-cell results.

A highly qualified reader emails me on heterogeneity

I won’t indent further, all the rest is from the reader:

“Some thoughts on your heterogeneity post. I agree this is still bafflingly under-discussed in “the discourse” & people are grasping onto policy arguments but ignoring the medical/bio aspects since ignorance of those is higher.

Nobody knows the answer right now, obviously, but I did want to call out two hypotheses that remain underrated:

1) Genetic variation

This means variation in the genetics of people (not the virus). We already know that (a) mutation in single genes can lead to extreme susceptibility to other infections, e.g Epstein–Barr (usually harmless but sometimes severe), tuberculosis; (b) mutation in many genes can cause disease susceptibility to vary — diabetes (WHO link), heart disease are two examples, which is why when you go to the doctor you are asked if you have a family history of these.

It is unlikely that COVID was type (a), but it’s quite likely that COVID is type (b). In other words, I expect that there are a certain set of genes which (if you have the “wrong” variants) pre-dispose you to have a severe case of COVID, another set of genes which (if you have the “wrong” variants) predispose you to have a mild case, and if you’re lucky enough to have the right variants of these you are most likely going to get a mild or asymptomatic case.

There has been some good preliminary work on this which was also under-discussed:

You will note that the majority of doctors/nurses who died of COVID in the UK were South Asian. This is quite striking. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/world/europe/coronavirus-doctors-immigrants.html — Goldacre et al’s excellent paper also found this on a broader scale (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1). From a probability point of view, this alone should make one suspect a genetic component.

There is plenty of other anecdotal evidence to suggest that this hypothesis is likely as well (e.g. entire families all getting severe cases of the disease suggesting a genetic component), happy to elaborate more but you get the idea.

Why don’t we know the answer yet? We unfortunately don’t have a great answer yet for lack of sufficient data, i.e. you need a dataset that has patient clinical outcomes + sequenced genomes, for a significant number of patients; with this dataset, you could then correlate the presences of genes {a,b,c} with severe disease outcomes and draw some tentative conclusions. These are known as GWAS studies (genome wide association study) as you probably know.

The dataset needs to be global in order to be representative. No such dataset exists, because of the healthcare data-sharing problem.

2) Strain

It’s now mostly accepted that there are two “strains” of COVID, that the second arose in late January and contains a spike protein variant that wasn’t present in the original ancestral strain, and that this new strain (“D614G”) now represents ~97% of new isolates. The Sabeti lab (Harvard) paper from a couple of days ago is a good summary of the evidence. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.04.187757v1 — note that in cell cultures it is 3-9x more infective than the ancestral strain. Unlikely to be that big of a difference in humans for various reasons, but still striking/interesting.

Almost nobody was talking about this for months, and only recently was there any mainstream coverage of this. You’ve already covered it, so I won’t belabor the point.

So could this explain Asia/hetereogeneities? We don’t know the answer, and indeed it is extremely hard to figure out the answer (because as you note each country had different policies, chance plays a role, there are simply too many factors overall).

I will, however, note that this the distribution of each strain by geography is very easy to look up, and the results are at least suggestive:

  • Visit Nextstrain (Trevor Bedford’s project)
  • Select the most significant variant locus on the spike protein (614)
  • This gives you a global map of the balance between the more infective variant (G) and the less infective one (D) https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global?c=gt-S_614
  • The “G” strain has grown and dominated global cases everywhere, suggesting that it really is more infective
  • A cursory look here suggests that East Asia mostly has the less infective strain (in blue) whereas rest of the world is dominated by the more infective strain:
  • image.png

– Compare Western Europe, dominated by the “yellow” (more infective) strain:

image.png

You can do a similar analysis of West Coast/East Coast in February/March on Nextstrain and you will find a similar scenario there (NYC had the G variant, Seattle/SF had the D).

Again, the point of this email is not that I (or anyone!) knows the answers at this point, but I do think the above two hypotheses are not being discussed enough, largely because nobody feels qualified to reason about them. So everyone talks about mask-wearing or lockdowns instead. The parable of the streetlight effect comes to mind.”

Tuesday assorted links

1. Older people are less pessimistic about the health risks of Covid-19.

2. “…these results document that voting rights, when combined with elected, rather than appointed, chief law enforcement officers, can lead to improved treatment of minority groups by police.

3. “We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student achievement.

4. Covid summary update.

5. How the police think, good and highly relevant piece.

6. New criticism of the relevance of the T-cell immunity factor.

7. Amia Srinivasan on pronouns in LRB.

8. “I have identified 103 such professors who offer their public support of Trump through blogs, essays, op-ed pieces, public lectures, tweets, YouTube videos, and even a couple of trade books.

Why the sudden uptick in cases?

From Nate Silver, I am smushing together his tweet storm:

Something to think about: re-openings have been occurring gradually since late April in different states/counties. If you had a metric averaging out how open different states are, it would likely show a fairly linear pattern. So why is there a nonlinear increase in cases now?

Obviously some of that gets to the nature of exponential growth. An R of 1.3 isn’t *that* different than an R of 1.1, but played out over a few weeks, it makes a lot of difference. Still, a more complete story probably includes premature re-openings coupled with other stuff.

What other stuff? Two things seem worth pointing out. First, there seems to be some correlation with greater spread in states where it’s hot and people are spending more time indoors with the AC on. That *is* a bit nonlinear; there’s much more demand for AC in June than May.

And second, the conversation around social distancing changed a lot in early June with the protests and Trump making plans to resume his rallies. And COVID was no longer the lead story. Not blaming anyone here. But the timing is pertinent if people felt like “lockdowns are over”.

Here is the link, including a good picture of how the demand for air conditioning rises.

Social Planners Do Not Exist

Enrico Spolaore on his friend, co-author, and mentor Alberto Alesina:

I first met Alberto thirty years ago at Harvard, where he had received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1986, and had returned as faculty, after a couple of years at Carnegie-Mellon. He was already deservedly famous. In 1988, The Economist had presciently picked him as one of the decade’s eight best young economists, as he was transforming the way we approach macroeconomics and economic policy by explicitly bringing politics into the analysis. In his influential contribution to the NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1988, he had forcefully stated that “social planners do not exist.” Economists should not just assume that governments would implement optimal policies (presumably following the economists’ own  recommendations). Instead, we should strive to understand actual policies as resulting from the strategic interactions of partisan politicians with each other and with the public, and often leading to socially inefficient outcomes.

Exactly right. Alesina was one of the most important scholars extending and integrating public choice, especially to macroeconomic questions.

That was then, this is now

Ali Akbar was two years younger than Robu [later named Ravi Shankar], but a couple of years ahead in his musical training.  He has been through a brutal regime: Baba had even tied him to a tree and beaten him when his progress was unsatisfactory.  Although Baba had arranged for Ali Akbar to marry at the age of fifteen, he still expected him to remain celibate — married to music.  Twice Ali Akbar ran away.  Ultimately the harsh discipline brought out his talent and made him into a master of the sarod, although one wonders about the emotional cost.

That is from Oliver Craske’s Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, which I am quite enjoying.

From Lockdown to Liberty

Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver 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.

Comfort foods make a comeback

Comfort foods from big brands are seeing a resurgence, executives say, as consumers seek familiarity and convenience amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Many shoppers have favored fresh and specialty brands over Big Food’s processed products in recent years, while others have opted for cheaper store brands. Now, the world’s largest makers of packaged foods say frozen pizza, pasta sauce, and mac and cheese are rising in favor as consumers in lockdown eat at home.

Nestlé SA NSRGY 3.04% became the latest to detail the trend Friday when it reported stronger organic sales growth for the first quarter driven by Americans stockpiling its DiGiorno pizza, Stouffer’s frozen meals and Hot Pockets sandwiches. Baking brands like Toll House and Carnation also performed well, it said…

Overall, U.S. store sales of soup rose 37%, canned meat climbed 60% and frozen pizza jumped 51% for the week to April 11, according to research firm Nielsen…

“We’ve seen time and time again that big brands tend to do well when people are feeling anxious and under threat,” Chief Executive Alan Jope said. He added that he expects the shift to larger brands to last a couple of years.

I wonder how general this trend is.  I have seen data that readers are buying more long classic novels, and I am struck by my anecdotal observations of satellite radio.  I am driving much less than before (where is there to go?), but per minute it seems I am more likely to hear “Hey Jude” and “In My Life” on the Beatles channel than in times past.  Who wants to go out for their periodic 20-minute jaunt and have to sit through 6:34 of George Harrison’s “It’s All too Much”?

Here is the full WSJ story by Saabira Chaushuri.  As for food, I am more inclined to consume items that can be easily shipped and stored, and if need be frozen.  That favors meat and beans, and disfavors fresh fruit and bread.  Frozen corn is a big winner, as are pickles.  The relative durable cauliflower and squash do better than some of the more fragile vegetables, such as leaf spinach.  I am not desiring comfort food per se, but I do wish to cook dishes requiring a relatively small number of items (otherwise maybe I can’t get them all), and that does almost by definition overlap with the comfort food category.

Thursday assorted links

1. Why is the Eastern European response better? (WSJ)  And how are Swedish hospitals doing?

2. Further doubts on the LOA and Santa Clara serology stories, it now seems they really do not establish any particular results.

3. Why a vaccine will be tough, a depressing thread.  And are China’s early patients shedding coronavirus?

4. Ezra Klein on why we can’t build things.

5. Why two decades of pandemic planning failed.

6. New Joshua Gans book, Economics in the Age of Covid-19, MIT Press.

7. Hollis Robbins on why some saw this coming before others.

8. New Becker-Friedman Center podcast on Pandemic Economics.

9. Various forms of presenting state-level data.  What exactly is going on with Ohio?

10. Are we prepping for vaccine state capacity?

11. Department of Why Not?: “Former Labradoodle breeder tapped to lead U.S. pandemic task force.

12. The couple that meets on the German-Danish border during lockdown (NYT).

13. The Fed and saving cities (NYT).

Why the low status of opposition to child abuse?

Michael Kaan emails me:

Hi Tyler, I’m a healthcare professional in Canada and a long-time reader of your blog. For the past couple of years, observing the culture wars and various elections, I’ve noticed that child abuse is an extremely rare topic among the cultural left: the highly visible progressive segment that drives wokeness, is culturally powerful, etc. You know what their dominant concerns are. (On the right it’s basically non-existent.)

While there’s nothing obviously wrong with their attention to sexual and racial discrimination, the energy put into it is disproportionate to the massive social cost of child abuse. Rates vary around the world, but in general it looks like about 30% of all children globally suffer some sort of serious maltreatment each year, often many times a year, repeated over multiple years.
So one can easily estimate that billions of people have experienced this. In other words, more people have been abused as children than have experienced war, famine, or epidemics.
The impact and costs of this have been measured (low academic achievement, health problems, low earnings, drug and alcohol use, etc.), and child abuse is sometimes lethal. What puzzles me is why it has no legs politically. Among the woke crowd, if child abuse is mentioned it’s usually in terms of discrimination against girls or sexual minorities. But there are really no prominent voices actively campaigning to mitigate child abuse generally.
Why is this? Is it overly complex? Is the phenomenon too widely dispersed demographically, so that an evil agent group isn’t easily identified? Does its persistence foreground chronic failures of the welfare state (if that’s the case)? Is it boring?

For a start, I would note that virtually everyone is again child abuse, so opposing it doesn’t make anyone significant look worse.  But I am sure there is much more to it than that.

Supply curves slope upward, Switzerland fact of the day, and how to get more tests done

Under Swiss law, every resident is required to purchase health insurance from one of several non-profit providers. Those on low incomes receive a subsidy for the cost of cover. As early as March 4, the federal health office announced that the cost of the test — CHF 180 ($189) — would be reimbursed for all policyholders.

Here is the article, that reimbursement is about 4x where U.S. levels had been.  The semi-good news is that the payments to Abbott are going up:

The U.S. government will nearly double the amount it pays hospitals and medical centers to run Abbott Laboratories’ large-scale coronavirus tests, an incentive to get the facilities to hire more technicians and expand testing that has fallen significantly short of the machines’ potential.

Abbott’s m2000 machines, which can process up to 1 million tests per week, haven’t been fully used because not enough technicians have been hired to run them, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In other words, we have policymakers who do not know that supply curves slope upwards (who ever might have taught them that?).

The same person who sent me that Swiss link also sends along this advice, which I will not further indent:

“As you know, there are 3 main venues for diagnostic tests in the U.S., which are:

1.       Centralized labs, dominated by Quest and LabCorp

2.       Labs at hospitals and large clinics

3.       Point-of-care tests

There is also the CDC, although my understanding is that its testing capacity is very limited.  There may be reliability issues with POC tests, because apparently the most accurate test is derived from sticking a cotton swab far down in a patient’s nasal cavity.  So I think this leaves centralized labs and hospital labs.  Centralized labs perform lots of diagnostic tests in the U.S. and my understanding is this occurs because of their inherent lower costs structures compared to hospital labs.  Hospital labs could conduct many diagnostic tests, but they choose not to because of their higher costs.

In this context, my assumption is that the relatively poor CMS reimbursement of COVID-19 tests of around $40 per test, means that only the centralized labs are able to test at volume and not lose money in the process.  Even in the case of centralized labs, they may have issues, because I don’t think they are set up to test deadly infection diseases at volume.  I’m guessing you read the NY Times article on New Jersey testing yesterday, and that made me aware that patients often sneeze when the cotton swab is inserted in their noses.  Thus, it may be difficult to extract samples from suspected COVID-19 patients in a typical lab setting.  This can be diligence easily by visiting a Quest or LabCorp facility.  Thus, additional cost may be required to set up the infrastructure (e.g., testing tents in the parking lot?) to perform the sample extraction.

Thus, if I were testing czar, which I obviously am not, I would recommend the following steps to substantially ramp up U.S. testing:

1.       Perform a rough and rapid diligence process lasting 2 or 3 days to validate the assumptions above and the approach described below, and specifically the $200 reimbursement number (see below).  Importantly, estimate the amount of unused COVID-19 testing capacity that currently exists in U.S. hospitals, but is not being used because of a shortage of kits/reagents and because of low reimbursement.  This number could be very low, very high or anywhere in between.  I suspect it is high to very high, but I’m not sure.

2.       Increase CMS reimbursement per COVID-19 tests from about $40 to about $200.  Explain to whomever is necessary to convince (CMS?…Congress?…) why this dramatic increase is necessary, i.e., to offset higher costs for reagents, etc. and to fund necessary improvements in testing infrastructure, facilities and personnel.  Explain that this increase is necessary so hospital labs to ramp up testing, and not lose money in the process.  Explain how $200 is similar to what some other countries are paying (e.g., Switzerland at $189)

3.       Make this higher reimbursement temporary, but through June 30, 2020. Hopefully testing expands by then, and whatever parties bring on additional testing by then have recouped their fixed costs.

4.       If necessary, justify the math, i.e., $200 per test, multiplied by roughly 1 or 2 million tests per day (roughly the target) x 75 days equals $15 to $30 billion, which is probably a bargain in the circumstances.

5.       Work with the centralized labs (e.g., Quest, LabCorp., etc.), hospitals and healthcare clinics and manufactures of testing equipment and reagents (e.g., ThermoFisher, Roche, Abbott, etc.) to hopefully accelerate the testing process.

6.       Try to get other payors (e.g., HMOs, PPOs, etc.) to follow CMS lead on reimbursement.  This should not be difficult as other payors often follow CMS lead.

Just my $0.02.”

TC again: Here is a Politico article on why testing growth has been slow.

The Economic Consequences of the Virus?

The inhabitant of New York could order by computer, sipping his morning coffee in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate with passport or other formality and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing just a credit card upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved by the TSA but otherwise much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, exclusion and of pandemics which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily twitter feed, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

Only slightly modified.

Tethered pairs and locational extremes

Let us assume that you, for reasons of choice or necessity, are spending time in close quarters with another person.  You are then less inclined to visit corona-dangerous locations.  In part you are altruistic toward the other person, and in part for selfish reasons you do not wish to lower the common standard of care.  If you go to a dangerous location, the other person might decide to do the same, if only out of retaliation or frustration.

In essence, by accepting such a tethered pair relationship, you end up much closer (physically, most of all) to one person and much more distant from the others.  You are boosting your locational extremes.

The physically closer you are to the other person, the more easily you can tell if he or she is breaking the basic agreement of minimal risk.  That tends to make the tethered pairs relatively stable.  Monitoring is face-to-face!

Tethered pairs also limit your mobility, because each of the two parties must agree that the new proposed location is safe enough.

People who live alone, and do not know each other initially, might benefit from accepting a tethered pair relationship.  The other person can help them with chores, problems, advice, etc., and furthermore the other person may induce safer behavior.  (Choose a carpenter, not a specialist!)  Many people will take risks if they are the only loser, but not if someone else might suffer as well.

A tethered triplet is harder to maintain than a tethered pair.  For one thing, the larger the group the harder it is to monitor the behavior of the others.  Furthermore, having a third person around helps you less than having a second person around (diminishing marginal utility, plus Sartre).  Finally, as the group grows large there are so many veto points on what is a safe location ( a larger tethered pair might work better with a clear leader).

Yet over time the larger groups might prove more stable, even if they are riskier.  As more things break down, or the risk of boredom and frustration rises, the larger groups may offer some practical advantages and furthermore the entertainments of the larger group might prevent group members from making dangerous trips to “the outside world.”

There is an external benefit to choosing a tethered pair (or triplet, or more), because you pull that person out of potential circulation, thus easing congestion and in turn contagion risk.  Public spaces become safer.

As you choose a tethered pair initially, the risk is relatively high.  The other member of the pair might already be contagious, and you do not yet have much information about what that person has been up to.  As the tethered pair relationship proceeds, however, it seems safer and safer (“well, I’m not sick yet!”), and after two weeks of enforced confinement it might be pretty safe indeed.

Very often married couples will start out as natural tethered pairs.  At the margin, should public policy be trying to encourage additional tethered pairs?  Or only in the early stages of pandemics, when “formation risk” tends to be relatively low?  Do tethered pairs become safer again (but also less beneficial?), as a society approaches herd immunity?

It may be easier for societies with less sexual segregation to create stable tethered pairs, since couple status is more likely to overlap with “best friend” status.

One advantage of good, frequent, and common testing is that it encourage the formation of more tethered pairs.

You can modify this analysis by introducing children (or parents) more explicitly, or by considering the varying ages of group members.  You might, for instance, prefer to be a tethered pair with a younger person, but not everyone can achieve that.

World 2.0 — “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”

This is from a very able and perceptive correspondent:

World 1.0 World 2.0
110 successive months of job growth 10 million jobless claims in 2 weeks
10 year bull market across sectors Winners and losers with extreme outcome inequality
Full employment 30% unemployment
Base rate thinking First principles thinking
Physical Digital
Office by default Remote by default
Office for work Office for connection, community, ecosystem, makerspaces
Suit, tie, wristwatch, business card Good lighting, microphone, webcam, home office background
Commute + traffic jams Home + family
Last mile Only mile
Restaurants Groceries + delivery
$4 toast Sourdough starter
Walkscore Speedtest
Cities Internet
$100k for college Not paying $100k for a webinar
City Countryside
YIMBY NIMBY
Internal issues Exogenous shock
Lots of little problems One big problem
Stupid bullshit Actual issues
Too much technology Too little technology
Complacency Action
Years Days
Policy Capacity
Ideology Competence
Assume some government competence Assume zero government competence
Institutions Ghost ships
WHO Who?
Trusted institutions Trusted people
Globalization Decoupling
Just-in-time Stockpile
Tail risk is kooky Tail risk is mainstream
NATO Asia
Boomers most powerful Boomers most vulnerable
Productivity growth collapse Economic collapse
Social services Democrat UBI Communist
Propaganda Propaganda
Deficit hawks MMT
Corporate debt Government debt
Techlash Tech a pillar of civilization and lifeline to billions
Break up Amazon Don’t break up Amazon!!!
Avoiding social issues Avoiding layoffs
Sports Esports
Phone is a cigarette Phone is oxygen
Resource depletion $20 oil, $0.75 watt solar, <$100/kwh batteries
Stasis Change
Low volatility High volatility
Design Logistics
Extrovert Introvert
Open Closed
20th century 21st century