J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 52

Notes from Lockdown (from Project Syndicate)

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/notes-from-lockdown

I. Where We Are & What I Am Doing

As of now, the guess is that one person in 80 in California has or had the coronavirus. We rank 30th among the United States with 40 confirmed (and probably 60 true) coronavirus deaths per million. I am trying not to catch the disease, so that I do not then become one of those who spread it. I am going for long (isolated) walks in the hills of Berkeley and Oakland. I am watching lots of old movies. I am trying to let the orange-haired baboon who is President Trump live rent-free in my brain only between 8:00-8:15 PM, and spend only 8:15-9:00 PM thinking about coronavirus. And otherwise I am trying to play my position.

 

II. I Am, Right Now, for Relaxation...
...Rewatching:

Old movies: I was, first, most impressed this time through by: The Thin Man and After the Thin Man���1930s detective comedies, William Powell & Myrna Loy directed by W. S. Van Dyke with story by Dashiell Hammett and screenplay by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. I found myself most interested by the portrayal of class in America in the 1930s that Hollywood was then serving up. I was, second, profoundly re-impressed by: Stardust���2000s romantic fantasy, Claire Danes & Charlie Cox, with over-the-top-supporting-excellence from Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ricky Gervais, Mark Strong, and Ian McKellan, directed by Matthew Vaughn with story by Neil Gaiman and screenplay by Vaughn and Jane Goldman.

 

...Rereading:

Barry Eichengreen: Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History (about the Great Depression and the Great Recession) and The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (about the repeated erosions of democracy in the global north in the 20th and early 21st centuries). They are both excellent���even better than I had remembered. I can no longer just walk down the hall to Barry���s office and talk to him. But, as Niccolo Machiavelli, in one of the first generations in which a person could have a personal library, said, when he went into his library he:

enter[s] the ancient courts of ancient men��� received by them with affection��� I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me���

It is, actually, not the same. Barry���s books are not a Turing-class instantiation of his mind, but they are a remarkably close substitute.

 

...Reading:

Glen Weldon: The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture: Why and how the character of Batman has turned out to have more legs over the generations than the others of the ���superhero��� genre, precisely because he is not a superhero, and on the dialogue between character, writers, artists, and readers that has produced so many different forms and emotional tones in the tellings and retellings of the stories of what is still, recognizably, the same character.

Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli: Batman: Year One: Available on Kindle Unlimited, and perhaps the best telling of the ���Dark Batman��� version of the story.

Gwendolyn Leick: Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City: Our current mode of human existence has remarkably deep roots in the choices made by the societies of Sumer and Akkad more than four millennia ago. What those choices were, and how they have echoed and continue to echo.

Tobias Straumann: 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler: The best thing I have read in a decade about how the policymakers of Germany did even worse in the mid-stage of the slide into the Great Depression than the policymakers of Western Europe and North America did in the Great Recession.

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#berkeley #cognition #coronavirus #highlighted #invisiblecollege #projectsyndicate #2020-04-25

Note to Self: Heterogeneity in the S, I, R Model...

So instead of doing my day job this afternoon, I began wondering about how much the Susceptible, Infected, Recovered (or Not)'s suppression of individual heterogeneity affects its conclusions.

Suppose that people have different amounts of gregariousness/infectiveness. If everyone were like the most gregarious and vulnerable people the R_0 for the epidemic would be 5. If everyone were like the least gregarious and vulnerable people the R_0 for the epidemic would be 0. And suppose we have the population varying linearly between those extremes.

How much different would the course of the epidemic be than for a society where everyone was identical, and R_0 was 2.5?

The answer is: substantially.

If I have not made a mistake in my model-building or my python code���always an "if"���then the difference is substantial: 26% of the population escapes the epidemic for R_0 distributed between 0 and 5 with an average of 2.5. Only 10% escapes the epidemic if everyone's R_0 is 2.5.

The intuition is clear: By the time half of the population has been infected, an overwhelming number of those with high R_0's have been infected. Thus those who are still susceptible have personal R_0's much lower than the average. In the early stages, however���before any noticeable component of the population has been infected���the course of the epidemic tracks the average R_0 very closely. It is when it begins to fall off the exponential that the differences become apparent: not only are some of those who would be infected by exponential growth now immune (or dead), but those left who could be infected have lower R_0's than the average.

weblog support: https://github.com/braddelong/weblog-support/blob/master/coronavirus-r0-heterogeneity.ipynb

nbViewer: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/braddelong/weblog-support/blob/master/coronavirus-r0-heterogeneity.ipynb

datahub: http://datahub.berkeley.edu/user-redirect/interact?account=braddelong&repo=weblog-support&branch=master&path=coronavirus-r0-heterogeneity.ipynb

#coronavirus #notetoself #publichealth #2020-05-03


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What Did I Think About Coronavirus When?

I Am Aware of Coronavirus in Early February

The first time I can find myself speaking publicly about the coronavirus outbreak came on February 3, 2020, in the introductory lead-in to my twentieth century economic history lecture. I then said, roughly:

The next six to nine months are likely to be quite unpleasant for the world

Globally, the public health authorities are still hoping to keep deaths at much, much less than 30 million dead worldwide. This will be accomplished largely by slowing down international travel, and interregional travel in China, for a great deal of time. The National Institutes of Health and other research organizations need to figure out what this sucker is and how to train all of our immune systems up to deal with it. Border control authorities will have to pull people with symptoms aside and quarantine them until they conclude that they do not have it.

This is a new age.

In some ways, however, this new age is like a very old age.

Back up 2000 years: Remember the coming of the Roman Empire and with the unification of China under the Qin Dynasty, and then with the stabilization of Central Asia under the Parthians, all happening in the years -200 to the year 1 or so. Humanity then reached a stage in which you only had to cross two substantial borders in order to get all the way from the Gibraltar in Spain to the Sea of Japan.

You would cross one border when you left the Roman Empire for the area of influence of the Parthians, You would cross another when you left the Parthian-influenced oases in Central Asia for those that had a Han Chinese influence. Provided that no one in any of those three empires in a position of authority wanted you dead, you could travel from one edge of Eurasia to another with relative ease, and with little fear: the three respective imperial peaces by and large held.

And, 150 years later, from 165-180, we see for the first time a Eurasia-wide plague. We see not a plague located to one single province, but instead reports about it coming up pretty much everywhere. Globalization brings travel, and traveling people bring diseases���the 160s Plague of the Antonines or of Galen that was perhaps Smallpox; the 249 Plague of Saint Cyprian that may have been something Ebola-related boiling out of Africa through Sudan and then up the Nile (but we're not sure); and the Plague of Justinian in the 530s, which we are pretty are was a bubonic plague, the kind that still has reservoirs among the rodents of the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies.

If you get bitten by a rodent in the high mountains of the American West, go to the doctor. Go to the doctor quickly. You never know what you might have caught.

Wish all the public health people luck. This is a potentially big challenge. Curses on the Chinese government, which failed to have the right incentives in place for officials in Wuhan to report what was going on early enough.

As a result of that failure to report, we are still largely flying blind. We do not have good public health indications of the rapid spread of this thing in its first stages. And those would be very useful now in trying to figure out what it's going to bring to the world.

Be anxious but not too anxious: We have a powerful, rich, and enormously technologically capable civilization. Our public health technologies, especially, are mighty. And while the worst-case scenario as of now looks much, much more likely than it looked two weeks ago, the worse-case scenario itself looks much, much better than the worst-case scenario of two weeks ago looked���or so my public health contacts say.

And with that, the professor concludes this opening digression, which he punctuates with yet another deep-in-the-bronchiii cough.

It is clear to me that I then had a bunch of things in my head, some right and some wrong, including:

The wrong belief that asymptomatic transmission was not frequent, so stopping the symptomatic for quarantine at borders would be effective.
The wrong belief that governments would quickly move to stop and quarantine anyone with a fever or a cough at border control.
The right belief that if this thing got out into the world its symptomatic attack rate would be 60% or so.
The probably right belief that the mortality rate among the symptomatic would be between 0.5% and 1.0%.
The belief that success in containing COVID-19 would be keeping the global death toll from the epidemic below 10 million.
The belief that failure could be a global death tool of: 8 billion x 60% x 1% = 50 million.
The wrong belief that the United States had little to fear���that we would stomp this thing at the borders, and that the cases that slipped through would then be dealt with by isolate-trace-&-test-&-isolate.
The wrong belief that our public health authorities and our government could be competent���that we would not suffer from the deficiencies of authoritarian government which had hobbled the early-stage response in China.

I had not remembered���or I had underestimated���the dire level of incompetence and foolishness of the orange-haired baboon who is President Donald Trump. And I had not remembered���or I had underestimated���the extent to which everyone now working for the Trump administration was craven or incompetent or both.

 

Iran & Coronavirus in Early March

I may have talked about coronavirus in lecture later on in February. I do not remember doing so. I went back over the automatic transcripts, but not all recorded lectures have transcripts, and not all lectures were recorded by the course-capture process, I do know that coronavirus was on my (and the students���) minds, so the next time it emerged in the news, with the outbreak in Iran, I once again talked about it at the start of lecture. This is from March 4, 2020:

Iran. Iran says that it has so far had 3,000 coronavirus cases, and that 100 people have died of coronavirus. However, at the cabinet meeting Wednesday morning, both Vice President Jahangiri and Industry Minister Rahmani were absent. There are reports about Rahmani being hospitalized in an ICU. The chief of staff is also absent. The Supreme Economic Coordinating Council appears to be down from six people to three.

What are the odds that the 3,000 and the 100 or so are all members of Iran's elite?

We have no clue how large this is in Iran.

But it seems like the thing has majorly jumped, from China to Iran and possibly elsewhere. As a result, we now are living in the spring of coronavirus.

Calls for what Berkeley will do are Carol Christ's.

That said, if you are coughing and sneezing���if you are coughing and sneezing, go get tested. And until you get tested, please stay home. Email me, and I'll give you lots and lots of extra credit points for being willing to hang out in your home, eating potato chips, rather than infecting other people with possible coronavirus.

Otherwise��� there are powerful, powerful reasons to come to lecture. There are powerful herd animal benefits. The experiment with MOOCs has not gone well over the past decade. Getting people in a room together at a specific time, and then having them near other people thinking about the same thing, seems to have mammoth benefits.

As for what's likely to happen during coronavirus, I am not an expert. You should find someone in a public health program. They are the experts���

#coronavirus #highlighted #publichealth #2020-04-27

Notes from Lockdown (Draft for Project Syndicate)

I. Where We Are & What I Am Doing

As of now, the guess is that one person in 80 in California has or had the coronavirus. We rank 30th among the United States with 40 confirmed (and probably 60 true) coronavirus deaths per million. I am trying not to catch the disease, so that I do not then become one of those who spread it. I am going for long (isolated) walks in the hills of Berkeley and Oakland. I am watching lots of old movies. I am trying to let the orange-haired baboon who is President Trump live rent-free in my brain only between 8:00-8:15 PM, and spend only 8:15-9:00 PM thinking about coronavirus. And otherwise I am trying to play my position.

 

II. I Am, Right Now, for Relaxation...
...Rewatching:

Old movies: I was, first, most impressed this time through by: The Thin Man and After the Thin Man���1930s detective comedies, William Powell & Myrna Loy directed by W. S. Van Dyke with story by Dashiell Hammett and screenplay by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. I found myself most interested by the portrayal of class in America in the 1930s that Hollywood was then serving up. I was, second, profoundly re-impressed by: Stardust���2000s romantic fantasy, Claire Danes & Charlie Cox, with over-the-top-supporting-excellence from Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ricky Gervais, Mark Strong, and Ian McKellan, directed by Matthew Vaughn with story by Neil Gaiman and screenplay by Vaughn and Jane Goldman.

 

...Rereading:

Barry Eichengreen: Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History (about the Great Depression and the Great Recession) and The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (about the repeated erosions of democracy in the global north in the 20th and early 21st centuries). They are both excellent���even better than I had remembered. I can no longer just walk down the hall to Barry���s office and talk to him. But, as Niccolo Machiavelli, in one of the first generations in which a person could have a personal library, said, when he went into his library he:

enter[s] the ancient courts of ancient men��� received by them with affection��� I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me���

It is, actually, not the same. Barry���s books are not a Turing-class instantiation of his mind, but they are a remarkably close substitute.

 

...Reading:

Glen Weldon: The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture: Why and how the character of Batman has turned out to have more legs over the generations than the others of the ���superhero��� genre, precisely because he is not a superhero, and on the dialogue between character, writers, artists, and readers that has produced so many different forms and emotional tones in the tellings and retellings of the stories of what is still, recognizably, the same character.

Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli: Batman: Year One: Available on Kindle Unlimited, and perhaps the best telling of the ���Dark Batman��� version of the story.

Gwendolyn Leick: Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City: Our current mode of human existence has remarkably deep roots in the choices made by the societies of Sumer and Akkad more than four millennia ago. What those choices were, and how they have echoed and continue to echo.

Tobias Straumann: 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler: The best thing I have read in a decade about how the policymakers of Germany did even worse in the mid-stage of the slide into the Great Depression than the policymakers of Western Europe and North America did in the Great Recession.

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#berkeley #coronavirus #projectsyndicate #2020-04-25

The Hoover Institute's Richard Epstein Is an Intellectual Fraudster, Pure and Simple...

A good liar needs to have a good memory. Richard Epstein has a bad memory. Richard Epstein is a bad liar https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnPMacke/status/1251716101819584513.

On Mar 16 he forecast https://www.hoover.org/research/coronavirus-pandemic that the U.S. would see about 500 deaths from coronavirus.

He then on Mar 23 wrote https://www.hoover.org/research/coronavirus-overreaction that that 500 estimate was low, and that he now had a revised forecast of 2,500.

Today the March 16 article���still datestamped March 16���has been silently changed. Why? To make it appear that on Mar 16 he forecast not 500, and not 2500, but 5000 U.S. deaths.

Today the Mar 16 article contains a "Correction & Addendum as of March 24"���the datestamp Mar 24 of which is false���that states that he had intended on Mar 16 to forecast 50,000 U.S. deaths: "my original erroneous estimate of 5,000 dead in the US is a number ten times smaller than I intended to state..."

The Mar 24 datestamp is false because the "Correction & Addendum as of March 24" has itself been silently revised: the "Correction & Addendum as of March 24" originally read: "That estimate is ten times greater than the 500 number I erroneously put in the initial draft of the essay...

Could this be funnier?

Confused? Epstein is now claiming that he originally intended on Mar 16 to forecast 50,000 U.S. dead but "erroneously" put 5,000 in his "initial draft".

In actual fact, his original Mar 16 forecast was 500.

In actual fact, on Mar 23 Epstein stated that his initial calculations had been in error, and that a better forecast was "2000-2500".

In actual fact, on Mar 24, Epstein added his "Correction & Addendum" raising his better forecast to 5,000, and acknowledging that that 5,000 forecast was a tenfold increase over his initial 500 forecast.

In actual fact, sometime between Mar 24 and today, Apr 21, Epstein silently revised his Mar 16 article���keeping the Mar 16 datestamp���so that it falsely appears that its forecast was not 500 but 5000.

In actual fact, sometime between Mar 24 and today, Apr 21, Epstein silently revised his Mar 24 "Correction & Addendum" to his Mar 16 article so that it now falsely claims that his original estimate was not 500 but 5000.

In actual fact, sometime between Mar 24 and today, Apr 21, Epstein silently revised his Mar 24 "Correction & Addendum" to his Mar 16 article to add the���previously never made, and so I conclude entirely false���claim that he on Mar 16 had "intended" to forecast 50,000 U.S. deaths from coronavirus.

I am with Paul Campos here: This is intellectual fraud, pure and simple.

Richard Epstein (2020-03-23): Coronavirus Overreaction https://www.hoover.org/research/coronavirus-overreaction https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-epstein-coronavirus-2020-03-23.pdf: 'In my��column��last week, I predicted that the world would eventually see about 50,000 deaths from the novel coronavirus, and the United States about 500...

Richard Epstein (2020-03-23): Coronavirus Overreaction https://www.hoover.org/research/coronavirus-overreaction https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-epstein-coronavirus-2020-03-23.pdf: 'The total US deaths should be about 4 to 5 percent of that [world] total [of 50,000], or about 2,000���2,500 deaths. The current numbers are getting larger, so it is possible both figures will move up in a rough proportion from even that revised estimate...

Richard Epstein (2020-03-16): Coronavirus Perspective https://www.hoover.org/research/coronavirus-pandemic: 'It seems more probable than not that the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000. In the United States, the current 67 deaths should reach��about 5000 (or ten percent of my estimated world total, which may also turn out to be low). [Correction & Addendum as of March 24, 2020:��My original erroneous estimate of 5,000 dead in the US is a number ten times smaller than I intended to state, and it too could prove somewhat optimistic...

Richard Epstein (2020-03-16): Coronavirus Perspective: '[Correction & Addendum, added March 24,2020: That estimate is ten times greater than the 500 number I erroneously put in the initial draft of the essay...

Paul Campos: Richard Epstein Has Yet More to Say About Our Little Pandemic https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/04/richard-epstein-has-yet-more-to-say-about-our-pandemic: 'UPDATE: This is academic fraud [by Richard Epstein], straight up: ,https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnPMacke... Summary: Epstein took down the original link to his March 16th piece that predicted 500 deaths, and replaced it with a link to an edited piece that claimed ���My original erroneous estimate of 5,000 dead in the US is a number ten times smaller than I intended to state������ The original version of this ���correction��� read: ���That estimate is ten times greater than the 500 number I erroneously put in the initial draft of the essay.��� Now he���s fraudulently altering his original text to make it seem as if his original ���gaffe,��� as he���s calling it, was to predict 5,000 deaths, because he intended to predict 50,000. He���s trying to make the original version look like a typo, AND he���s removing a zero from the original prediction. Note that SEVEN DAYS AFTER the March 16th column he had upped his prediction to 2000-2500 deaths. He���s trying to produce the Internet equivalent of a forged document to muddle the record. h/t Dilan Esper...

#coronavirus #highlighted #lyingliarslie #orangehairedbaboons #2020-04-21

Note to Self: Francois Velde on Economic Effects of Spanish Flu: European Macro History Online Seminar

Note to Self: "European Macro History Online Seminar: session 1" will begin in 1 hour on:
Date Time: Apr 21, 2020 04:00 PM Paris: Francois Velde on economic effects of Spanish Flu:

 

Employment in the Spanish Flu

 

The Early Amazon Effect: Mail-Order Retail in the Spanish Flu

#economichistory #macro #notetoself #publichealth #2020-04-21

Note to Self: Why Do We Know So Little About Coronavirus?

Note to Self: If the mortality rate on true cases is 1% and if it takes two weeks from testing to death then, as the U.S. tested and confirmed cases in March, the U.S. 4/5 of the way through March was catching only one in fifteen cases:

https://delong.typepad.com/files/coronavirus-extrapolations.pdf

That would suggest that currently something like 10 million people in America have or had the disease, and that some 500,000 a day are getting it.

If the share of deaths among those whom the virus brushes past close enough that they develop at least temporary immunity���which is the number we really wish we knew���is not 1% but 0.3%, than those csae numbers are 30 million, and 1.5 million a day...

#coronavirus #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-04-18

The United States Has Been Treading Water on Coronavirus since Early April

Other countries have managed to get R[0] well below 1���have begun substantially shrinking the daily number of new cases.

The United States has not:

Our current level of social distancing and lockdown appears to be producing about 30,000 new confirmed cases a day. We are no longer���and have not for two weeks been���ramping up and utilitizing our testing capabilities. On our current trajectory we look to be incurring about 2000 reported coronavirus deaths a day.

Our medical system is handling the current run of cases. But it would be nice to get the number of cases down and the number of tests up so that we could begin implementing test-and-trace. But that requires a lot more tests���which are not there. And that required more effective social distancing to get R[0] substantially below one���which is not there, certainly not at a nationwide level.

#coronavirus #highlighted #orangehairedbaboons #2020-04-18

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop https://www.bradford-delong...

Comment of the Day: Phil Koop https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/what-is-the-real-prevalence-of-coronavirus-across-states.html#comment-6a00e551f080038834025d9b4755b8200c: ' Adjusting for lag presumably requires both a model and longitudinal data to input to the model. So the starting point is with cross-sectional random samples. If we guess the true rate of infections is about 3%, then we need a test with very good specificity. An RNA test, even if had 100% specificity, could only tell us about current infections, not cumulative infections. A serologic test can tell us about cumulative infections as of 2-3 weeks ago, provided it has good enough specificity. There is a list of serologic tests here: https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID-19/serology/Serology-based-tests-for-COVID-19.html. Some of these are claimed to have 100% specificity, but of those, none are yet approved for use in the US. Of the tests approved for use in the US, the only one with a listed specificity is 95.6% (a suspiciously precise number, given it was tested in "a total of 128 COVID19 positive patients, and 250 COVID19 negative patients (as detected by RT-qPCR).") 95.6%, even if correct, would not be nearly good enough. I think that whatever is right is going to have to start with a good-enough test....

#commentoftheday #2020-04-17

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels https://www.bradford-d...

Comment of the Day: Ronald Brakels https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/coronavirus-daily-read-list.html: 'It's 11:00 pm in Washington DC on the 10th of April. Australia's COVID-19 death toll is 54. The United State's is 18,747. The US has 13 times Australia's population, so the per capita death toll in the US is 27 times higher. Both countries had similar time to prepare. At current rates, the US death toll will end up hundreds of times higher on a per capita basis...

#commentoftheday #2020-04-17