General update, April 27

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1. The NYT has a hopeful story.

On April 14, Mr. Bello was disconnected from the ventilator and began breathing on his own for the first time in 32 days.

This time, when she received a FaceTime call from the hospital, his wife gathered the children around. On the screen, he whispered the first words he’d been able to say to his family in a month: “I love you.”

As he was wheeled out of the I.C.U. to a regular floor, the medical staff, previously despondent about his case, lined the hospital hallway, erupting in applause. He waved.

I know of another lawyer who was taken off a ventilator several days ago, to the joy of the hospital staff, who said he was the first Covid-19 patient that they had been able to take off a ventilator while alive.

His Zoom funeral was yesterday.

2. Scott Gottlieb writes,

it could be years before a vaccine is produced at a scale sufficient to help the entire world. The first country to the finish line will be first to restore its economy and global influence. America risks being second.

China is making rapid progress, with three vaccines entering advanced development. Chinese officials say they could have a vaccine available for widespread use next year.

There certainly are worse priorities than trying to develop a vaccine. But the tone of the piece is that all it takes to succeed is sufficient national willpower.

3. T.J. Rodgers writes,

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%

I don’t trust the method, but I suspect that with better methods one would get similar results. I don’t think that government restrictions save lives. But of course, Justin Wolfers would not agree.

4. Joshua R. Goldstein and Ronald D. Lee write,

We estimate 75% of all US Covid-19 deaths to be age 70 or above, somewhat above the 64% for normal mortality. In fact, the age-distribution of deaths attributed to Covid-19 so far is quite similar to that of all-cause mortality, which tends to increase by about ten percent every year of age after age 30.

The goal of the paper is to provide a way to think about the mortality risk that the virus provides. One measure is the amount by which the presence of the virus increases your effective age. They scale this by the severity of the overall outbreak, meaning whether it kills 125,000 people in total or 2 million people in total.

An impact of 1 million deaths in three months in the United States would have the effect of temporarily exposing a 60 year-old to the normal mortality of a 73 year old.

In other words, a fairly large outbreak makes age 60 the new 73 in terms of mortality risk. Pointer from John Alcorn.

5. Today’s email included a message from Democracy Journal promoting a new book by Gene Sperling based on his essay Economic Dignity.

An economic dignity compact must ensure that those who do their part are able to care and provide opportunity for family. . .

Each American must have true first and second chances to pursue his or her potential. As Martha Nussbaum writes, “The notion of dignity is closely related to the idea of active striving.”

. . .A definition of economic dignity must include the capacity to contribute economically with respect and without domination and humiliation.

As I see it, the virus is causing a lot of people to lose their economic dignity. The lockdowns are making that worse. I think that the best hope for recovering economic dignity is a very strong dose of capitalism–letting price signals and the profit-and-loss system guide people into meaningful economic roles.

We want to do work that other people appreciate. That gives us dignity. Sitting at home waiting for permission from the government does not.

6. A paper by Sumedha Gupta and others.

Using multiple proxy outcome measures, we find large declines in mobility in all states since the start of the epidemic. Even states that did not implement major policy changes have experienced large mobility declines, and other states experienced large changes before the policy actions.

The best part is the charts at the end. For example, a chart showing trends in “social mixing” shows a sharp decline from about March 5 through about March 23, and a slower decline thereafter.

The authors speculate that lifting restrictions could have a stronger effect in causing people to go out by giving the impression that everything is all right. That may be a valid concern. If I were the government official announcing that restrictions are lifted, I would say very emphatically “This is not an all clear. This is simply a policy that leaves the choice up to individuals and businesses how they wish to handle risk.” I also think that a mandatory masks-when-in-public policy would send the right signal.

7. Here is a new paper by Jason Abaluck and others on the case for wearing masks. I have not read it. Sounds like academics getting a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. (BGO is not my phrase, just so you know)

13 thoughts on “General update, April 27”

  1. “We want to do work that other people appreciate. That gives us dignity. Sitting at home waiting for permission from the government does not.”

    In addition, we also want to witness other people doing work that other’s appreciate. I miss this!

  2. If it’s 75% of deaths for folk over 70, the example should probably be 70 year olds are like 83 year olds; and 80 year olds are like 93 year olds.
    For those over 80, just about every year they survive is another gift.

    It’s better with more grandkids! (like you note).

    Ventilators are not sufficient. So insufficient, in fact, they should be considered a high risk, hail Mary attempt because nothing else is better. Where is the age data on survival rates of those who go on ventilators? Survive 1 month or more after? (Survive a year or more? none yet…)

    My pet policy for years has been a Job Guarantee, far better than UBI. (5) Economic Dignity is a good reason for it. Trump should make it a campaign issue. Better than another $1 trillion in bailouts for Big Banks and other rich orgs.

  4. Thanks for an interesting post.

    The Sperling article on Economic Dignity was about 80 per cent pure liberal chum. Puts me right to sleep, and I am a liberal.

    However the section on Economic Domination and Humiliation is worthwhile. Restaurant workers who get $2 an hour and rely on tips are a disgrace. Amazon’s labor practices and the meat packing industry are generally disgraceful.

    Historically these are corrected by unions. So in these few industries, I go one past Liz Warren. I would have mandatory unions, and close down any resisting employers.

    • Wait staff and others in restaurants who get tip income have a minimum hourly wage rate. Then that rate, plus their reported tips are added up and if they don’t reach the minimum wage rate the employer is required to make up the difference. If they make over the minimum wage rate, the they keep the higher income. At least that was how it was 40 years ago and I haven’t seen the minimum wage laws being disfavored over that 40 years.

  5. “I also think that a mandatory masks-when-in-public policy would send the right signal.”

    I know Kling is very bullish on masks. However, the cloth masks recommended for the general public are not thought to provide much, if any, protection for the wearer. Because the masks directly touch the nose and mouth, however, my understanding is that a mask does present non-negligible risk to the wearer if not handled properly. (This is one of the reasons why the CDC was initially reluctant to recommend masks.) My understanding is that proper handling means: (1) washing hands immediately before putting the mask on to avoid contaminating the mask; (2) washing hands immediately after putting the mask on in case the mask contaminated one’s hands; (3) avoiding touching the mask while wearing, including temporarily placing the mask below one’s chin to talk/eat, which I see lots of people do; (4) if one does need to remove the mask while out, carry a brown paper bag to put the mask in rather than placing it on a possibly contaminated surface; (5) label one side of the bag “inside” and the other “outside” to ensure always placing the mask in the bag in the same direction so as to avoid allowing the outside of the mask to contaminate the inside through contact with the inside of the bag; (6) washing hands immediately before removing mask; (7) washing hands immediately after removing mask; (7) properly laundering the mask and storing to avoid contamination. The wearer needs to do all of that just to come out neutral because, again, the mask’s main benefit is to everyone else besides the wearer.

    Assuming that we haven’t reached herd immunity — and if we have then why require masks — the wearer is 50-95%+ likely to not be infected. Does it really make sense to *require* a most likely uninfected wearer to put his own health at risk for the benefit of everyone else? Also, keep in mind that everyone else can be protected by staying 6+ feet away, so the wearer is under continuous and invisible risk of a contaminated mask while others are only at risk during the brief moments when they pass within 6 ft of the wearer and they know when those moments are happening. The principle of “that which is not forbidden should be mandatory” seems especially pernicious in this case.

    • Regarding the Abaluck et al paper, I think we have to question the soundness of an economic case for cloth masks — and the authors are trying to make an economic case — when the authors continually emphasize the need to stop “hoarding” of medical-grade masks, i.e., they claim that one good reason to require the public to wear cloth masks is so they won’t try to wear medical-grade masks. Masks (cloth and medical) are clearly rivalrous and excludable. Market prices, if allowed to fluctuate, already reflect the social opportunity cost when one person wears a mask to the exclusion of another. That’s true whether one or both people are health care workers. Because masks are much more valuable to health care workers than the general public, hospitals with their multi-billion dollar budgets will easily outbid the general public for masks. (Alternatively, separate commercial and retail markets for masks would emerge with differences in packaging and distribution.) We have shortages mainly due to anti-price gouging laws and customs.

      The authors even note that requirements/recommendations that the general public wear cloth masks seems to have spurred professional and homemade production of such masks. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that public demand for medical-grade masks might similarly induce greater production.

    • (8) Don’t pull down the mask to cough freely. I’ve seen this several times. Let your droplets stay inside your mask.

  7. It is remarkable how quickly China is developing vaccines for Covid-19. It’s almost like they were working with the virus beforehand.

  8. In terms of the age realities of COVID-19 deaths and politics is you recommended Republicans/Libertarians pursue older voters who tend to vote at higher rates and dominate non-Presidential elections.

    At the point of general election polls, Biden is leading Trump with senior citizens voting which is incredibly hard to believe. Republicans have won Senior Citizens dating back to 2000. (Nate Cohn and Harry Enten have seen this and written about it with a little suspect of this holding.)

    And without Senior Citizens advantage, how do you expect Trump to win the 2020 election?

  9. ” If I were the government official announcing that restrictions are lifted, I would say very emphatically “This is not an all clear. This is simply a policy that leaves the choice up to individuals and businesses how they wish to handle risk.””

    Or they could say something like the truth. Namely, that outside healthcare settings and the households of those with the virus, the significant feature of super-spreader events is ****Prolonged (10+ min), close-range, face-to-face conversations***
    i.e., just don’t do that.

    Don’t shake hands, don’t embrace, don’t sing in a group, or yell in a group, especially indoors. Quiet conversation is not a significant threat, unless the speaker is a “wet talker.” And quite frankly, avoid them like the plague unless they were a face covering.

    The major mistake has been not refining the needed adaptations beyond “six feet social distancing or you die”. But our “experts” have not done any of that over the last 8 weeks. You can add in, that transmission from a surface is not a big vector, but wash your hands and be mindful of when your hands touch your face to be safe (from this virus, others, bacteria, etc.).

    Treating the American people like adults would go a long way, but that is not what they teach in the universities.

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