Results for “age of em” 17238 found
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.
Most Grand Princess passengers not tested
They solved for the equilibrium:
Despite assurances from Vice President Mike Pence that all Grand Princess cruise ship passengers quarantined at Travis Air Force Base would be tested for COVID-19, The Chronicle has learned that two-thirds of them have declined, often at the encouragement of federal health officials.
As of Wednesday, 568 of the 858 passengers screened while confined turned down the test, a federal official familiar with the Travis quarantine and testing told The Chronicle. The low testing numbers align with what passengers were told by officials during a Tuesday afternoon teleconference, citing a 30% acceptance rate for the novel coronavirus test, several passengers told The Chronicle.
“These folks know they are in a 14-day quarantine, if they test positive they are further delayed until they test negative,” said the official, who The Chronicle agreed not to name because they were not authorized to speak to the media, in accordance with the paper’s ethics policy. “They don’t want to stay. They want to be released.”
Interpret the resulting data accordingly, of course. Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
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.
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.
Convalescent Blood Therapy
A simple and medically feasible strategy is available now for treating COVID-19 patients, transfuse blood plasma from recovered patients. The idea is that the antibodies from the recovered patients will help the infected patients. The idea is an old one and has been used before with some success. Here is Robert Kruse from Johns Hopkins (who also makes other suggestions):
A simple but potentially very effective tool that can be used in infectious outbreaks is to use the serum of patients who have recovered from the virus to treat patients who contract the virus in the future. Patients with resolved viral infection will develop a polyclonal antibody immune response to different viral antigens of 2019-nCoV. Some of these polyclonal anti-bodies will likely neutralize the virus and prevent new rounds of infection, and the patients with resolved infection should produce 2019-nCoV antibodies in high titer.Patients with resolved cases of 2019-nCoV can simply donate plasma, and then this plasma can be transfused into infected patients. Given that plasma donation is well established, and the transfusion of plasma is also routine medical care, this proposal does not need any new science or medical approvals in order to be put into place. Indeed, the same rationale was used in the treatment of several Ebola patients with convalescent serum during the outbreak in 2014–2015, including two American healthcare workers who became infected.
As the outbreak continues, more patients who survived infection will become available to serve as donors to make antisera for 2019-nCoV, and a sizeable stock of antisera could be developed to serve as a treatment for the sickest patients.
Kruse worries that the exponential growth of the pandemic will be too fast but I think he makes a mistake. The number of recovered patients will far exceed the number of hospitalized patients so the supply of plasma will rise more quickly than the demand.
Convalescent blood therapy was used to treat people during the 1918 flu pandemic and appeared to be useful (see here for references to papers from that time.) A recent meta-analysis of patients treated with blood therapy during the 1918 flu found good results (noting, of course, that data from a hundred years ago wasn’t ideal) :
Patients with Spanish influenza pneumonia who received influenza-convalescent human blood products may have experienced a clinically important reduction in the risk for death. Convalescent human H5N1 plasma could be an effective, timely, and widely available treatment that should be studied in clinical trials.
Blood therapy has also been used periodically since that time to treat Ebola patients, MERS patients, Junin patients and others but under non-ideal conditions where lots of things were being tried at the same time and controls were not ideal. Results have been mostly positive or non-negative, e.g. this study on 84 Ebola patients found few benefits but also small costs. Blood therapy has also been used for animals.
To implement we need a database of recovered patients. The recovered patients then needed to be tested to find those with the most antibodies. It is probably best to use recovered patients from the same location to maximize overlap although the Chinese brought plasma from China to Italy. Most of the dangers from blood transfusion such as passing on another disease are well understood and should be manageable with testing and knowledge of donors. In rare cases such as Dengue it can bad to stimulate the immune system (see discussion here).
Plasma therapy is not difficult and there are firms with expertise in the field including Takeda and Regenernon the latter of whom developed a blood based treatment for Ebola. Thus, CBP seems worthy of consideration.
Hat tip: Monique van Hoek.
It matters that more older people are working now
Working women – For the first time, there are now more women aged 60-64 in work than not, analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics shows. The shift has been triggered by changes to the state pension age, the data reveals, with the number of older women in the workforce increasing by 51% since the reforms were introduced in 2010. The number of working men aged between 60 and 64 increased by 13% over the same period. Experts described the shift as “seismic” and said it would have profound implications for women now and in later life.
That is from the Guardian about the UK, via Stephen Gibbons.
A report from the hospital front, from a reliable source
I visited *** Health Center in ***. They are not a hospital, more like an urgent care clinic funded by the city and state. They act as triage for three area hospitals, take vital signs, can write prescriptions and send serious cases to Hospital ERs. They have been overwhelmed with people worried about COVID-19…They had been testing people for the virus; they have run out of re-agent so they have stopped that….If they were provided with isolation beds and ventilators, could they take 20 patients? No, it is not in their license and an application to change their license takes two years. When NYC reaches maximum hospital capacity, this clinic will not be part of the solution.
I visited [underfunded public health consortium] in ***, which was at the forefront of the response to H1N1 in 2009 and Sandy in 2012. They typically see 150 ER patients a day; during H1N1 they averaged 350 at the peak; they think they will be over 1000 during COVID-19….There is no such thing as a “test kit” which tests for the virus; when people talk about those kits, such as those dropped onto that cruise ship, they are talking about a nasal swab packaged with some reagent, which is then mailed to a facility with a Polymerase Chain Reaction Machine that can look for the RNA from the virus.
You can find PCR machines on eBay for $25,000; such a machine is labor intensive and can do maybe 10 tests a day. The hospital complex I visited, which has been designated a testing center, has been swabbing about 200 people a day and receiving multiples of that number from other hospitals. The vast majority they are sending off to a federal lab. Two weeks ago the turnaround time was three days; now it is five to six.
There are much faster machines. The Roche Cobas 6800 can do 3000 tests a day with very little human interaction; it costs $500k a year to rent, which is way outside a poor hospitals’s budget (while still not providing sufficient testing for the receiving area in the coming months.) Outside their budget until today, when we gave that money (I specified first year only, though they should be sure to ask in a year) as part of a larger check. We also gave money for 10 transport ventilators with two ports, 20 isolation beds, the money to hire 14 nurses for round the clock coverage of those beds for 6 weeks, and other things that they need. Overall it was a $1 million check, with a promise to talk to them in a week to cover anything we might have missed and to talk to them whenever they ask during the crisis. Overall, I was pretty happy with the visit. They were stunned, they work in a bureaucracy where everything takes 3 years.
One thing that they can’t get enough of is N-95s [face masks]. The first thing that almost every doctor I talked to mentioned was the frustration at having to re-use N-95’s, not for multiple patients, but for multiple days.
Again, here are the Emergent Ventures prizes to encourage work to support work to fight the coronavirus, and please support them if you can.
Robert Browning and Ingmar Bergman in a Bloomberg column
With all those fools going to bars and concerts, or running marathons, it is evident we still need to solve the problem of entertainment, as I argue in my new Bloomberg column.
It is instructive to look back to the days of World War II. The U.S. government played a critical role in encouraging Hollywood to make cheery movies, and it helped by not trying to force every actor into the armed services. Major league baseball, the national pastime of the era, continued to hold a regular season and a World Series, again to distract people from wartime worries. Many top players, such as Ted Williams, were away fighting, but there were adequate replacements. The government knew that wartime drama could not be the only drama on tap.
With Covid-19, the goal is to keep people at home, at least if they are not essential workers. But if staying at home is too boring, cabin fever will take over and people will run out to social gatherings when they ought to be staying put. So solving the entertainment problem is one very real piece of the puzzle for minimizing the effects of the coronavirus and keeping Americans not just in good spirits but healthy.
The very worst scenario is that the coronavirus itself — how it is playing out, how officials and celebrities and neighbors are reacting — becomes our main entertainment. It could become an ongoing horror show that drives us crazy and makes people even more cynical about politics.
To avoid such a mix of frustration and terror, I have a modest proposal: We should restructure a few of our traditional entertainments to be safe from the coronavirus.
As suggested on Twitter, how about inducing a few of the cable providers to offer free streaming for a few months? The Met has announced a big increase in opera streaming. And:
Or how about proceeding with some version of the NBA Finals? Take a subset of the best qualifying teams, test every player for coronavirus, isolate them in a remote area with a college gymnasium, and have them proceed with a shortened version of the real thing in front of only a TV crew. With so many other public events closed down, television viewership would probably reach an all-time high, and the sense of drama would be incredible. It would be one NBA Finals we would never forget, and the quality of play would respond to the very high psychological stakes.
Ben Golliver serves up a concrete NBA proposal. You’ll have to click through to get to the Browning and Bergman parts, the latter being Easter egg. At least the Candidate’s Tournament still seems to be on in chess, you can all watch that for the next few weeks, starts Tuesday I believe, try www.chessbomb.com.
Lecturing alone won’t work: we really do need to make it more fun for people to stay at home!
Pay people to quarantine
Once a pool of money has been allocated to a city or region, the people who are paid to quarantine would be determined by auction. There are many options around how to design pricing mechanisms to incentivize consecutive days of quarantine and other types of health improving behaviors. Based on the committed payments for a city, the price of remaining quarantined would be set on a daily basis.
Consider what the cost might be to pay to place 10% of a city’s population into quarantine. I believe that it costs significantly less than minimum wage for those people. The population that would be quarantining would be the young, elderly, the sick, and those for whom working at home is possible. Quarantining a sizable portion of a population dramatically slows the progression of a virus. Even at 30% of the population, I expect the price would remain well below minimum wage. This would have a dramatic impact on the pace of spreading.
That is from Nate Baker, enforcement would be by cyber-surveillance.
A 21st Century Jobs Program
Sick pay pays sick people to stay home but to defeat the virus we also want lots of healthy people to stay home. We also want to support people who are at home because they can’t find work. We can accomplish these goals by subsidizing work using services like Upwork or Mechanical Turk. Jobs on platforms like Upwork are the shovel-ready work of the 21st century. A 21st century jobs program would pay people to stay home and isolate, support people without work, and produce some useful output all at the same time.
Instead of paying people to dig and then fill ditches we could pay people to help train machine-learning apps, enter data, subtitle videos. take surveys, maybe even fold proteins to disrupt viruses.
More generally, how about paying people to take online courses? i.e. an income support program and a human capital investment program at the same time. Of course, not everyone would do well and people would cheat but think of these programs as a combination of paying people to isolate, maintaining aggregate demand and providing a source of income when low-wage restaurant and other service-jobs are declining but with a work requirement.
Hat tip: Discussion with Nate Baker. See also John Horton and Arindrajit Dube.
The Danes wish to know more about the coronavirus
From Martin Permin, for formatting reasons I have imposed no further indentation:
“Thanks for the excellent coverage on MR.
I lead a small team of tech workers in Copenhagen, who are donating our time and money towards building a covid-19 self-reporting tool for those citizens not (yet) in contact with health care services.
As countries shift from containment to “flatten the curve” strategies, authorities lose track of the number of non-critical cases, and to which degree people adhere to social distancing dictums. This makes it hard to predict the number if ICU beds needed a few days into the future. We’re aiming to solve this by asking all Danes for daily status updates.
Denmark is a good testing ground, but we’ll open source everything, and are building with developing countries in mind. We’re aiming to launch Monday — currently working on a green light from local health authorities.
We’re determining which data to collect. We’d love it if you’d help by asking your audience: “What daily self reported measures would you most like to see from the complete population Denmark?” (or some variation thereof).
There is of course a tradeoff between data fidelity and engagement.
What we’re considering:
- Symptoms
- Binary
- Type
- Severity
- Whereabouts
- Degree of social distancing
- Hygienic measures
- Moral
- How concerned are you
- Do you know anyone who’s been sick”
Are there comparable efforts to do this elsewhere?
What is the inflation rate these days?
Airline tickets are dirt cheap, masks and test kits are super-expensive (have to marry a Prime Minister or qualify for the Utah Jazz), and demand is collapsing for commodities. Gas should be cheaper too. A museum visit soon may be infinite in price.
So what will the new overall rate of price inflation be? What is the quality-adjusted value of “buy a new Toyota plus ??? chance of coronavirus from the floor visit”?
What is the new quality-adjusted value of health care? It is (one hopes) more likely to save your life, but ?? percent of the staff are carriers themselves.
The new quality-adjusted value of on-line higher education?
How should we think about your rent payment, given how many of the urban amenities are shutting down? Has living next door to a park and walking trails suddenly escalated in value?
And a lot of the goods out there — if you can buy them — are option values. I don’t need more toilet paper, but I would pay a few dollars for the continued right to keep on buying toilet paper, which usually I take for granted. Our stocks of various commodities vary in value much more than they used to — now I treasure those Goya small red beans in the basement.
Is it still meaningful to just take the old price basket averages? Somehow I don’t think so.
If there is no well-defined rate of price inflation (finally Scott Sumner wins on that one), can there be a well-defined real interest rate? Is it very high or very low? Or just “a high variance real interest rate”? Or is the nominal interest rate the new real interest rate?
Was the nominal interest rate all along the interest rate that mattered and made sense?
Is any of this built into the macro models people are applying to this crisis? No.