J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 55

Lizzie Burden: Trump���s Crusade to Reopen the Economy ��...

Lizzie Burden: Trump���s Crusade to Reopen the Economy ���May See Extra 5M Deaths��� and a Second Fiscal Bailout https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/03/28/trumps-crusade-reopen-economy-may-see-extra-5m-deaths-second/: 'Economists know the shutdown can���t last forever. As Padhraic Garvey, head of research Americas at ING, said: ���Individuals have been told to literally go home because there���s no work for them. They have families to support and at a certain point, the pendulum has to swing back to supporting them.��� Nonetheless, there is consensus among economists that there is no trade-off between health and economics���yet. Jonathan Portes... ���Immediately we... should be trying to control the health consequences as much as possible. After that, the aim is to make sure that fall in GDP doesn���t have long-term economic damage.... In six months��� time you may ask whether to keep some restrictions at some economic cost because a vaccine might come along, or say we should live with it as long as it���s contained and controlled and just deal with localised outbreaks and accept the negative health consequences. That���d be a reasonable public health debate to have in six months���but not now���...

...Economists are also unanimously deferential to the scientists. ���You���re going to sacrifice people on the altar of what?��� Anat Admati, professor of finance and economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, asked. ���Stock prices? Whatever���s good for the public health crisis is actually the best for the economy as well. The fastest way to get back to work would be if you tested every single person in the US, symptoms or not. Then you���d know who to isolate and who can work.��� The respect is mutual. Public health experts��� reluctance to recommend widespread travel restrictions in January was partly based on fears of a disproportionate economic impact with only minimal epidemiological benefits.

The reality is the US shut down too late to copy China now, Brad DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said. ���If we had imposed the Wuhan lockdown then three weeks after... the hunker down could be relaxed.��� It���s no use trying to catch China by restarting prematurely. Trump, Larry Kudlow, his top economic adviser, and Steven Mnuchin, the US Treasury secretary, ���appear to want to draw to an inside straight and make the existential bet that transmission will melt away with the coming of spring and the warming up of the country,��� DeLong said. ���I have not found any economist who will say in private that that is not a very bad idea from a cost-benefit risk point of view.��� Besides, he said, the US has already lost all leverage over China. ���When the US economy reopens, US-China negotiations are likely to take the form of us saying, ���Please let us buy your stuff on whatever terms you offer.������...

Even if the lockdown does end at Easter, there���s a substantial risk that the decision could backfire. By DeLong���s sums, if coronavirus cases double in just under five days, they grow 100-fold in a month, so if 10,000 have it by Easter week, 100 million will have it by mid-June, at which point the disease will have run its course but hospitals will have been overwhelmed and the death rate will have increased to 6pc. ���Five million additional Americans will have died,��� he said. ���In return we will have produced an extra $1 trillion of stuff. That���s a trade-off of $200,000 (��164,000) per life, which is not a good trade-off to aim at making.���... Politics aside, the economic picture is bleak. In DeLong���s assessment: ���Right now we are f------���...

#noted #2020-03-28

Daily Notes: 2020-03-27

NOTES: U.S. Coronavirus Deaths https://www.icloud.com/numbers/0PB6Y9KF-SIgrQpyCsmkjm_Ww:

BEND THE CURVE, PEOPLE!!!!
1696 deaths as of 2020-03-27
1.895 is the log growth factor over the past week
500,000 is what you get if you project that out over the next three weeks, to April 17:

The people who will die on or before Apr 17 will have caught the coronavirus by... now. They are baked in the cake: Unless the curve has already bent, they are toast.

22,000,000 is what you get if you project that out over the next three weeks, to May 1:

The people who will die on or before May 1 will have caught the coronavirus by... Easter.
That number is too large: that tells us that the epidemic is running its course between now and Easter���unless the curve is bent, or has already been bent.
Our last time to act to stop spread is... now

 

NOTES: State-by-State Coronavirus https://www.icloud.com/numbers/0BQW1nH3Sk2kadzMnYOIFic_w:

Currently 4791 cases and 106 deaths in California: that's 121 reported cases per million���ranking 31st among states in the U.S...
If the death rate is 1%, then that means 265 true CA cases per million on Mar 6...
If it has been doubling every week, that means about 2100 true cases per million now, and the same number of new cases expected next week...

 

Currently 46,000 cases and 600 deaths in New York: that's 2400 reported cases per million���ranking 1st among states in the U.S...
If the death rate is 1%, then that means 3100 NY cases per million on Mar 6...
If it has been doubling every week, that means about 25000 true cases per million now, and the same number of new cases expected next week...

Things Accomplished:

Coronavirus Daily Read List https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/coronavirus-daily-read-list.html: NEJM Group: Updates on the Covid-19 Pandemic.... Worldometer: Coronavirus Update.... Financial Times: Coronavirus Tracked.... CDPH: News Releases 2020.... Josh Marshall: Epidemic Science & Health Twitter List...

Cases and Deaths from Coronavirus Doubling Every Three Days Is Very Bad News Indeed https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/cases-and-deaths-from-coronavirus-doubling-every-three-days-is-very-bad-news-indeed.html: I confess I am positively unmanned by the every-three-days doubling of reported cases and deaths here in the United States. I had thought that we would see true cases doubling every seven days. And back when reported cases started doubling every three days, I was encouraged, because I thought it meant that we were catching up on testing, and so getting closer to detecting the bulk of the symptomatic cases. But now it looks like that was wrong.... That means that the Trump administration has only 40% as much time to get its ass in gear as I thought it did. And that means the chances it will are very very low indeed...

Yet Another Rant on Coronavirus & Trump https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/yet-another-rant-on-coronavirus-trump.html: Could "reopening America for business" on Easter backfire? Oh, yes it could. Oh, it definitely could backfire: BIGTIME.... From May 1 to June 15 hospitals will have been overwhelmed. The likely death rate will have been not 1% but 6%. 5 million additional Americans will have died. In return we will have produced an extra $1 trillion of stuff. That's a tradeoff of $200K per life, which is not a good tradeoff to aim at making. And, while it could be better, it could be much worse...

Must-Reads:

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/rad-geek-_the-infovores-dilemma_-in-circumstances-that-lead-to-a-high-risk-of-groupthink-and-overreach-its-a-r.html: The first important question about life in a time of pandemic is: where do you get your information to keep from being overwhelmed and misinformed? Misinformation can and does come from almost everywhere. When Deborah Brix in the White House briefing room says that right now there is no ventilator shortage, many of the reporters in front of her and the watchers on the TV think: ���and we can easily produce enough ventilators and distribute them in a timely fashion that there will not be���. That second is an unwarranted inference���something that her political masters want the audience to believe, but that she almost surely does not believe. We put to one side the question: how does she expect to live with herself? The question for us is: how do we parse and understand the flow? Here Rad Geek has some very useful advice: Rad Geek: The Infovore���s Dilemma https://radgeek.com/gt/2020/03/23/the-infovores-dilemma/: 'In circumstances that lead to a high risk of groupthink and overreach, it���s a reason to explicitly employ evidential markers when reporting claims.... In a high info-garbage environment, it is often worthwhile to deliberately limit, compartmentalize or substitute the consumption of certain kinds of low-quality or risky information...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/are-all-right-wing-politicians-and-writers-save-mitt-romney-confirmed-atheists-certain-that-this-is-all-here-is-so-you-ha.html: Not to dunk on atheists���they are as moral as the next (wo)man, and much less likely to do evil things in a belief that some deity commands them. But if one lacks charity and empathy, fear of the LORD might substitute. That, at least, has been the argument for religion as a cement of social order down the ages. So now I have to ask: are all right-wing politicians and writers (save Mitt Romney) confirmed atheists? Certain that this is all here is, so you have to grab all the goodies you can with both hands right now? Is that any way to live?: Kevin Drum: Trump Says Jump; Wingers Ask How High https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/trump-says-jump-wingers-ask-how-high/: 'Modern conservative politics is remarkable. Two days ago it felt like everyone was totally on board with school closings and quarantines and social distancing. It was the new reality. Then Donald Trump announced that he didn���t really believe the experts after all and wanted to re-open the economy. Within 24 hours I swear that practically every conservative in the country was suddenly in agreement���or seriously considering it at the very least. All Trump had to do was open his mouth to produce a right-wing U-turn so violent you could almost hear the necks snapping. How has Trump done this?...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/claudia-sahm-joel-slemrod-and-matthew-shapiro-have-the-baton-on-the-effects-of-direct-payments-to-people-in-cushioning-the.html: Claudia Sahm, Joel Slemrod, and Matthew Shapiro have the baton on the effects of direct payments to people in cushioning the fall in aggregate demand during a recession. There are good reasons to fear that this supply shock induced recession will be different. But at the moment it is the best we got...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/jim-stocks-blog.html: In a good world, Jim Stock would already be back in the Eisenhower old executive office building chairing the Council of Economic Advisors during this crisis. He is vastly more thoughtful, more confident, and more up to speed on the issues and the trade-offs that we face, economically, during this public health crisis. However, we are not in a good world. We are in a very bad one. Already, the United States his response to the coronavirus is the worst in the world. And it only looks as though the gap between us and other countries is going to grow over the next months: Jim Stock: Coronavirus: Data Gaps and the Policy Response https://www.jimstock.org/2020/03/coronavirus-data-gaps-and-policy.html...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/let-me-endorse-this-as-a-thoughtful-assessment-of-how-important-it-is-to-keep-the-economy-from-sending-anybody-a-you-are-ban.html: Let me endorse this as a thoughtful assessment of how important it is to keep the economy from sending anybody a "you are bankrupt: shut down" signal by the economy in this public health crisis. Instead, every business and every workers should be being sent a "you are, at most, on pause: be ready to resume" signal by the economy. How to make sure that signal is sent requires fiscal stimulus an order of magnitude greater than the $2.2 trillion currently in the headlines. For one thing, it requires tolerance of inflation, as prices of medical equipment and necessities rise and as social distancing temporarily reduces productivity elsewhere in the economy: Peter R. Orszag: Social Distancing Makes Sense Only With Huge Fiscal Stimulus https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-22/social-distancing-makes-sense-only-with-huge-fiscal-stimulus...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/this-is-by-a-substantial-margin-the-best-thing-i-have-seen-on-the-coronavirus-and-where-we-are-with-respect-to-it-my-confid.html: 'This is by a substantial margin the best thing I have seen on the coronavirus, and where we are with respect to it. My confidence that the Trump administration and the Republican senatorial majority are up to the task of organizing this is too low to measure: Richard Danzig and Marc Lipsitch: Prepare Now for the Long War Against Coronavirus https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-20/prepare-now-for-the-long-war-against-coronavirus: 'It���s essential to clearly envision the problems we���ll face over the next 12 to 18 months and mobilize to respond right away...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/marc-lipsitch-_seasonality-of-sars-cov-2-will-covid-19-go-away-on-its-own-in-warmer-weather_-even-seasonal-infectio.html: As near as I can see, the Trump administration's coronavirus strategy���if it can be said to have a strategy at all���is to dither, doing the very minimum that the public health experts drive it to do well hoping that coronavirus will, like the standard flu, meltaway as the northern hemisphere warms up in the spring. This is a very low odds existential Bette to be making. If anyone has any insight into why they are making it, I would appreciate being dropped a line. Here we have somebody who knows what he is talking about explaining why this is the most draw-to-an-inside-straightish draw to an inside straight: Marc Lipsitch: Seasonality of SARS-CoV-2: Will COVID-19 Go Away on Its Own in Warmer Weather? https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/will-covid-19-go-away-on-its-own-in-warmer-weather/: 'Even seasonal infections can happen ���out of season��� when they are new. New viruses have a temporary but important advantage���few or no individuals in the population are immune to them.�� Old viruses, which have been in the population for longer, operate on a thinner margin...




#dailynotes #noted #weblogs #2020-03-27

Cases and Deaths from Coronavirus Doubling Every Three Days Is Very Bad News Indeed

I confess I am positively unmanned by the every-three-days doubling of reported cases and deaths here in the United States. I had thought that we would see true cases doubling every seven days. And back when reported cases started doubling every three days, I was encouraged, because I thought it meant that we were catching up on testing, and so getting closer to detecting the bulk of the symptomatic cases.

But now it looks like that was wrong: reported cases were doubling every three days because true cases were doubling every three days���that is what deaths tell us was happening to true cases up until three weeks ago. The lack of case curve-bending makes me think that testing is not improving. It makes me think that reported cases are doubling every three days because true cases are doubling every three days.

That means that the Trump administration has only 40% as much time to get its ass in gear as I thought it did.

And that means the chances it will are very very low indeed:

I must confess it had never occurred to me back when China shut down Wuhan that we would simply not test everyone who presented with symptoms���and then backtrace their contacts. It is really looking now as though China���even with its authoritarian blindness fumbling of the intitial response (see Zeynep Tufekci: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coronavirus-and-blindness-authoritarianism/606922/ is going to be studied in the future as a positive model of public health in the 21st century, while the Trump Administration���s reaction���currently on track as the worst in the world in handling coronavirus <https://www.evernote.com/l/AAFzPq9AJoFHFr_nrTPi1QyseD8WSAe0y00B/image.png>���will be studied in the future as a negative example: Brad DeLong: The Trump Administration���s Epic COVID-19 Failure https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/the-trump-administrations-epic-covid-19-failure-project-syndicate.html: 'As officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and other public-health bodies surely must have recognized, asymptomatic transmission means that the standard method of quarantining symptomatic travelers when they cross national (or provincial) borders is insufficient. It also means that we have known for almost two months that we were playing a long game against the virus. With its spread more or less inevitable, the primary task was always to reduce the pace of community transmission as much as possible, so that health-care systems would not be overwhelmed before a vaccine could be developed, tested, and deployed. In the long game against a contagious virus, how to mitigate transmission is no secret. In Singapore, which has largely contained the outbreak within its borders, all travelers from abroad have been required to self-quarantine for 14 days, regardless of whether they have symptoms. In Japan, South Korea, and other countries, testing for COVID-19 has been conducted on a massive scale. These are the measures that responsible governments take. You test as many people as you can, and when you locate areas of community transmission, you lock them down. At the same time, you build a database of all those who have already developed immunity and thus may safely resume their normal routine...

#coronavirus #highlighted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-03-27

Comment of the Day: Joe Barsugli https://www.bradford-del...

Comment of the Day: Joe Barsugli https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/dealing-with-coronavirus-the-hunker-down-and-the-jubilee.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4f57f77200d#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4f57f77200d: 'I agree with Jubilee, but Hunker Down has some problems. While I agree with the broad outline, we simply don't know how much hunkering down is needed to "reach a level that reduces the caseload to what the medical system can currently handle, but should not be pushed far beyond that point." I'm not sure you can fine-tune it. European experience seems to indicate that half-measures are much less than half-effective. Better to hit it hard with all you've got up front and hope you start to see results in 10-12 days. If the current measures prove adequate, then they have to be run for several cycles. China was extreme in its measures and beat the virus back in 6+ weeks. Lightening up too much too soon would lead to a second wave before we are ready to handle it...

...While the immediate goal is to keep the ICUs from being overwhelmed, the goal over the next month should also be to limit the percentage of the population that gets it in the first place. As we go from one in a thousand cases to one in a hundred to one in ten, with a roughly 10 day interval between each order of magnitude, we rapidly approach the worst case scenarios of many epidemiologists, even without overwhelming the hospitals. (Note: doubling in 3 days is almost exactly 10x in 10 days. Overall many places are faster than than if you look at hospitalizations).

I hope I am wrong, but I think you are overly optimistic that we can have adequate testing-tracking-isolation in place and functioning by June 1 without a major nationally coordinated effort, which won't happen. Of course we could have had that if we started taking this seriously in January and avoided most of the economic disruption, but we have a pretty heavy lift to get the case load back to where that is a nationally viable strategy. Can one city or state that has bent the curve go to Jubilee without effectively sealing their borders? Can a single nation?...

#commentoftheday #2020-03-27

Comment of the Day: Rad Geek https://www.bradford-delong....

Comment of the Day: Rad Geek https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/rad-geek-_the-infovores-dilemma_-in-circumstances-that-lead-to-a-high-risk-of-groupthink-and-overreach-its-a-r.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a51a750f200b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a51a750f200b: 'Rad Geek said in reply to Ebenezer Scrooge: "A really expert journo collects an awful lot of signal with very little added noise, even if the originals are mentally accessible and noise-free .... a general-purpose journo in a specialized beat is trouble, even if the journo is smart and fair. ... A good lawyer or journo can manipulate symbolic knowledge far better than those who have the tacit knowledge..." I don't think we disagree about the features that make a really expert journalist very valuable on a well-defined beat. Sure: and under ordinary conditions in an informational ecosystem, that's sometimes a pretty good reason to read newspaper reports more than you read abstracts, etc. But what I'm concerned about is what happens in extraordinary conditions in the informational ecosystem, when���for example���the sheer volume, rapid-fire turn-around times, and tremendously wide scope of issues involved mean that a lot more "general-purpose" journos are suddenly put onto specialized beats, or onto writing generalist stories that really essentially involve complicated issues from a specialized beat. (Call that the demand-side worry.)...

...And, also, even expert journos on a specialized beat do rely on a lot of the institutional and conventional environment around research to have much chance of getting their reporting mostly right most of the time; but under extraordinary conditions the institutions and conventions are likely to shift subtly or break off rapidly (no doubt for perfectly good reasons)���for example, when the tremendously large volume of simultaneous research shifts the environment towards much more frequent rapid-fire sharing of preliminary results, very tentative findings, possible breakthroughs, etc., in huge volumes, on very short turn-around times and often with minimal opportunity for peer review or revision before they are widely disseminated. (Call this the supply-side worry.)

My point is, the more you go towards those kind of situations, and towards stronger cases of these two kinds of worries, the more trouble you can expect from exactly the trouble that you point out, and that this can have some characteristic effects (for example a lot of unwarranted confidence, false precision, errors of groupthink and closed-mindedness towards possible falsification, and in general an unusually elevated likelihood that you'll hit points of diminishing or negative returns, where consuming more information fails to make you better informed).

(The suggestion that there may be better substitutes, e.g., in reading abstracts, depends on an underlying conjecture that these tend to do a better job than reporters of doing things like explicitly stating the simplifying assumptions behind models, stating ranges of possible values in outcomes, acknowledging rival explanations and limitations on the precision or generalizability of findings, etc. And also that these statements are comprehensible to the person reading them. If I'm wrong about the substitutability claim -- either because the sources don't do those things very well either, or because even if they do the reader is ill-prepared to understand or make use of them -- then in either case, that may be a reason for that reader to consume less information under the circumstances and to be relatively more agnostic and less confident in their beliefs about the topics in question.)...

#commentoftheday #2020-03-27

Comment of the Day: _'Joe Barsugli _ https://www.bradford...

Comment of the Day: _'Joe Barsugli _ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/dealing-with-coronavirus-the-hunker-down-and-the-jubilee.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a51a75b7200b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a51a75b7200b: 'At this point cases are not the best metric. Hospitalizations are goo now, until (and if) that system gets saturated. Then deaths...

#commentoftheday #2020-03-27

Yet Another Rant on Coronavirus & Trump

Could "reopening America for business" on Easter backfire? Oh, yes it could. Oh, it definitely could backfire: BIGTIME.

The experience so far is that, in a society not undertaking social distancing, coronavirus cases double in a little less than five days���grow 100-fold in a month. If, say, the virus has been largely suppressed and only 10000 in the U.S. have it Easter week, then after the u.S. is opened up 1 million will have it on May 15, and then 100 million on June 15, at which point the epidemic will have pretty much run its course. But from May 1 to June 15 hospitals will have been overwhelmed. The likely death rate will have been not 1% but 6%. 5 million additional Americans will have died.

In return we will have produced an extra $1 trillion of stuff.

That's a tradeoff of $200K per life, which is not a good tradeoff to aim at making.

And, while it could be better, it could be much worse...

The right way to do it is to lockdown while we test, test, test, test, test:

Test a random-sample panel of 10000 Americans weekly to get a handle on the progress of the disease.
Test everyone for antibodies.
Let those who have had the disease and so are no immune go back to work���after testing to make sure that they are immune.

Indeed, draft those who have recovered to be hospital orderlies and nurses.

Make decisions based on knowledge of where the epidemic is in the community, and tune quarantine, social distancing, and shutdown measures to those appropriate given where the epidemic is.

But we do not know where the epidemic is.

And because we are not testing on a sufficient scale, we will not know when and if the virus is truly on the run until a month after the peak, when deaths start dropping. And even then we will not know how much the virus is on the run.

And removing social distancing before the virus is thoroughly on the run means that the virus comes roaring back.

Once the virus is thoroughly on the run, then normal public health measures can handle it:

Test, test, test.
Test patients presenting with symptoms.
Trace and test their contacts. Do what Japan and Singapore did���close to the epicenter in Wuhan, yet still with true caseloads lower than one in ten thousand.
Test those crossing borders, symptomatic or not.
Test those moving from city to city via air.
Test a random sample on the interstates, to see how much virus is leaking from place to place that way.
Test a random sample of the population to see whether and how much the disease was established, and then test another one.

Wherever community transmission becomes reestablished, apply the Wuhan lockdown for at least three weeks, so the caseload could be diminished enough so that contact tracing could be resumed.

Build up a database of those who tested positive and are presumably now immune so that they can be on the frontlines of treatment and contact with those possibly newly infected, and reopen the economy by putting them in the jobs that have high human contact and thus high virus transmission rates.

Jim Stock at Harvard has lots of good ideas and has thought a lot about how to do the Hunker Down. He is actually the person I would be asking how to do this���very smart, and has thought hard over the past month about it.

My view, however, is that right now we are scr--ed AF.

It is the end of March. The United States has tested only 500,000 people. There is no nationwide random sample time series. An awful lot of symptomatic people were not tested, and were instead sent back into the community. By the metric of the speed of growth of reported cases since the establishment of the virus dated to the hundredth first-reported case, the U.S. has performed worst of any country: worse than Italy, worse than Spain, worse (we think) than Iran. The 105,000 cases reported as of the evening of Fr Mar 27 are just the tip of the iceberg. From 1700 currently reported deaths so far in the United States, we might guess that there were between 60 and 170 thousand cases active at the start of March, which have grown to between 600 thousand and 2.5 million new cases, with perhaps the same number coming in the next week.

But we really do not know where we are.

We have not imposed the Wuhan lockdown.

If we had imposed the Wuhan lockdown, then three weeks after the lockdown had been imposed, the Hunker Down could start to be relaxed. Then, if we had enough testing capacity, we could start to relax knowing how much and where we could do so without the virus roaring back. Public health could then do its normal job: testing a random sample, testing all those symptomatic, tracing contacts, quarantining, and so keeping the spread slow enough that the health care system is not overwhelmed and that the bulk of the cases come next year or the year after or even later, by which time our virologists will have worked miracles.

But Trump, Mnuchin, Kudlow, & co. appear to want to draw to an inside straight and make the existential bet that transmission will melt away with the coming of spring and the warming up of the country. It might. 10%.

I have not found any economist who will say in private that that is not a very bad idea from a cost-benefit risk point of view.

And then, in two months, we are going to want to restart all the businesses that were functioning as of March 15. Nobody should go bankrupt as a result of anything that happened between March 15 and May 15 this year. That should be the proper goal of economic policy: to create a moment of Jubilee in the middle of this spring.

How would I do it, if I were running economic policy? Medical tests, treatment, tests, food, utilities, plus everything we can do that does not require human-to-human contact within six feet���that should be the extent of our economy for the next three weeks. All else should be shut down. And then, in a month, everyone should go to the job they had on March 15. And if the financing isn't there to run your business on May 15���if you are bankrupt?

That is what the Jubilee is for: the government assumes your debts.

But what if people are worried about the now-higher government debt? That is good reason to impose a highly-progressive tax on income and wealth both to reassure investors that the long-term finances of the government are sound, and to recoup some of the unearned increment that will be captured over the next month by those who turn the lockdown into a source of financial advantage.

That is what the U.S. should do. That is not what the U.S. will do. For one thing, we do not have and are not making enough tests.

With respect to the "China" questions:

The U.S. has passed China in reported number of cases.
In two weeks, the U.S. is going to pass China in reported coronavirus deaths.
Unless China loses (or has already lost control of the virus and is suppressing the news), for the next 50 years China's rulers will say:

Our society handled this much better than yours did.
Look to us rather than the U.S. for models and as your partners.

The U.S. has lost all global leverage over China���unless they are suppressing very bad virus news, and I see only a 10% chance that they are.
When the U.S. economy reopens, U.S.-China negotiations are likely to take the form of us saying "please allow us to buy your stuff on whatever terms you offer".



#coronavirus #highlighted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-03-27

Someone who wishes me ill sends me this from Niall Fergus...

Someone who wishes me ill sends me this from Niall Ferguson, published on Mar 16. Two weeks from Mar 16 is Mar 30, three days from now. By then the U.S. is likely to have 180,000 reported cases and 3400 coronavirus deaths. I guess the big lesson is: mommas, don't let your kids grow up ignorant of exponentials... Niall Ferguson (2020-03-16): Opinion: The First Coronavirus Error Was Complacency https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-first-coronavirus-error-was-complacency/: 'In the panic of the pandemic, we are making a lot of category errors.... If the whole of U.S. goes the way of Italy then, adjusting for population, within two weeks there will 95,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and nearly 7,000 dead...

#noted #2020-03-27

Neil Ferguson: UK Has Enough Intensive Care Units For Cor...

Neil Ferguson: UK Has Enough Intensive Care Units For Coronavirus, Expert Predicts https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-intensive-care-units-for-coronavirus-expert-predicts/: '[Neil Ferguson] said the UK should have the testing capacity ���within a few weeks��� to copy what South Korea has done and aggressively test and trace the general population. New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. ���That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,��� he said. His comments come as a team at the University of Oxford released provisional findings of a different model that they say shows that up to half the UK population could already have been infected... It assumes that most people who contract the virus don���t show symptoms and that very few need to go to hospital. ���I don���t think that���s consistent with the observed data,��� Ferguson told the committee...

#noted #2020-03-27

Coronavirus Daily Read List

NEJM Group: Updates on the Covid-19 Pandemic http://m.n.nejm.org/nl/jsp/m.jsp?c=%40kxNtXckRDOq8oG0jJvAXsIzN4mPECIPhltxoTSdTU9k%3D&cid=DM89089_NEJM_COVID-19_Newsletter&bid=173498255: 'From the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM Journal Watch, NEJM Catalyst, and other trusted sources...

Worldometer: Coronavirus Update (Live) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/...

Financial Times: Coronavirus Tracked https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest...

CDPH: nCoV2019 Updates https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Immunization/ncov2019.aspx...

CDPH: News Releases 2020 https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OPA/Pages/New-Release-2020.aspx...

Josh Marshall: Epidemic Science & Health Twitter List https://twitter.com/i/lists/1233998285779632128...

#coronavirus #highlighted #publichealth #2020-03-27