Despite its smaller population, Iowa has half-again more COVID-19 cases than Minnesota. I’ve little doubt that this is due to Iowa still having no stay-at-home orders from the governor as well as the fact that Iowa hosts the country’s densest cluster of meatpacking facilities.
But despite Iowa’s much larger overall caseload, the state has also suffered fewer than half the deaths from COVID as Minnesota. Over ¾ of Iowa’s positive cases are in people aged 65 and younger, an age group that is highly likely to survive the virus. Minnesota’s cases are skewed into older age groups, making death more likely.
2. Tyler Cowen notes that people are turning toward comfort music and comfort food. I would add “comfort news” to the list. For the right, it’s news that supports the view that the virus is no worse than the flu. Right-wing sites are still all over the Santa Clara study as proof of that. For the left, comfort news includes analysis that blames the virus crisis on President Trump. The left also seems to want stories that show that remote learning and/or charter schools are really awful. There is a recent NYT story filled with such anecdotes. Meanwhile, I know a private school teacher who says that she is trying to make the best of it, noting that in this environment she has the ability to mute a student at the touch of a button.
3. WBUR reports,
After Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston began requiring that nearly everyone in the hospital wear masks, new coronavirus infections diagnosed in its staffers dropped by half — or more.
Brigham and Women’s epidemiologist Dr. Michael Klompas said the hospital mandated masks for all health care staffers on March 25, and extended the requirement to patients as well on April 6.
Pointer from Scott Sumner, who has other interesting items in his post.
4. Scott also points to a Vox story pooh-poohing the notion that the virus came from a Chinese lab. The story does not address the argument made by Weinstein/Heying that bats and pangolins do not ordinarily hang out together (I cannot explain why this makes the virus unnatural, but that is what they say).
5. Michael T. Olsterholm and Mark Olshaker write,
The F.D.A. must bring order to this chaos and determine which tests work well. It should stick to its normal review process but expedite it by giving it top priority with its clinical reviewers and bringing in more reviewers as necessary.
But they also write,
as long as testing for SARS-CoV-2 is too limited or unreliable, the United States must ramp up what public health professionals call “syndromic surveillance”: the practice by medical personnel of observing, recording and reporting telltale patterns of symptoms in patients
I also feel better about low-tech methods than I do about the technocrats’ favorites of models and tests.
6. Casey B. Mulligan, Kevin M. Murphy, and Robert H. Topel write,
If an extensive shutdown of economic activity costs $7 trillion, largely in terms of economic hardship, and a limited response would lead to a $6 trillion loss of life, then an intermediate solution could, in principle, achieve a great deal.
If you are salivating for a cost-benefit analysis, these may be your guys. I just skimmed it, then I did a search for the word “mask” which came up empty, and decided to dismiss it. Tyler Cowen says “They think like economists,” which would only be praise if we didn’t know that they are economists.
In the early innings of this crisis, the most resilient companies include blue-chip retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General, Costco, and Home Depot, all of whose stock prices are at or near record highs. Meanwhile, most small retailers—like hair salons, cafés, flower shops, and gyms—have less than one month’s cash on hand. One survey of several thousand small businesses, including hotels, theaters, and bars, found that just 30 percent of them expect to survive a lockdown that lasts four months.
Big companies have several advantages over smaller independents in a crisis. They have more cash reserves, better access to capital, and a general counsel’s office to furlough employees in an orderly fashion. Most important, their relationships with government and banks put them at the front of the line for bailouts.
Pointer from Tyler. That last sentence is the important one. The politicians talk about helping small business, but it’s the banks and the big companies that will wind up getting most of the newly-printed money.
Ironically, I think that ordinary people, as opposed to government officials, want to do the opposite. They want to support small businesses, and they don’t worry about the banks much. The contrast between the preferences of the people that earn money and the looting class that prints money could create some social tension in the months and years ahead.
“The story does not address the argument made by Weinstein/Heying that bats and pangolins do not ordinarily hang out together (I cannot explain why this makes the virus unnatural, but that is what they say).”
I listened to this yesterday — maybe on your link.
IIRC: They do not say bats and pangolins hang out together. They say for it to be natural mutation, a bat would have to infect a pangolin (he says reverse, she corrects to this) and the viruses get into the same cell and then the spike protein structure from the P virus combine into the B virus. They say more research must be done, by a wider range of experts. But I do not think they make any explicit claim as to whether P and B hang out together.
As to why unnatural, they say: the only method to this existing naturally would be for the bat and pangolin viruses to get together into a single host. For that to happen they would have to interact. They don’t say this didn’t happen, but just if you were able to establish that this type of bat and pangolins did not live in the same areas, it raises the probability that the virus was instead mad-made.
At least that’s what I took from the podcast.
Despite its smaller population, Iowa has half-again more
—
Wiki says:
The 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses, the first nominating contests in the Democratic Party primaries for the 2020 presidential election, took place on February 3, …
Why the religious belief in a mask to save u?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-has-no-clear-answers-on-the-coronavirus-face-masks-are-no-exception/
https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-surgical-cotton-masks-blocking-sars-cov-2-controlled-comparison
Maybe because I see so many masks in Asian countries with such good results.
Btw this virus came from ‘ferrets’
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503
Greg Cochran has more on some other gain of function research experiences.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/04/11/passages/
Similar attempts have been going on for a while, there was a moratorium on funding in the US for a see years, and attempts to block publication of Fouchier’s method and results, but eventually his paper got published anyway, and the moratorium lifted a few years ago.
If you’re going to study dangerous, highly infectious diseases on animals in a lab, you want to pass it a bunch of times to accumulate mutations to make it as infectious as possible, which also often increases its harmfulness.
And it wouldn’t be the first time a really bad flu-like illness escaped from a research center. See Lipsitch citing Webster in, “Ethical Alternatives to Experiments with Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens” – “There is a quantifiable possibility that these novel pathogens could be accidentally or deliberately released. Exacerbating the immunological vulnerability of human populations to PPPs is the potential for rapid global dissemination via ever-increasing human mobility. The dangers are not just hypothetical. The H1N1 influenza strain responsible for significant morbidity and mortality around the world from 1977 to 2009 is thought to have originated from a laboratory accident.”
“Pandemic because escaped from a lab” is bad enough as reality and not science fiction. But the worst part is that it lasted 32 years.
So, genetic engineered bioweapon is highly unlikely. Gain of function enhancements from natural samples for animal research, then lab accident, however, is not crazy implausible, given the outbreak began right by the lab the Chinese have to do just that stuff.
How do we know whether the whole “wet market” story is true, actually? Who said it first, and what evidence did they actually provide? Was it just a provisional guess? Did it just very repeated so often that it became uncontestable?
Wet market was perfect cover for animal to human transfer only, which (left wing) Fauci gullibly believed. Korea Sing HK Taiwan said no way do we trust PRC worlds and started testing at border, why they faired better, not mask.
For the two different viruses to create a third that is a hybrid, at some point the two viruses have to infect the same cell in the same animal. This is the only natural way for the RNA blueprint of the two viruses to be mixed because it is only in the cell that the RNA is constructed in the first place.
If the evidence does show RNA segments from viruses of such distinct hosts, then it definitely raises the possibility that the virus is man-made. However, I have claims made before about how segments of the Covid virus are not natural to the family, but the evidence to date always seems to be made of cobwebs.
I am not trained in economics, and it probably shows, but I have never understood the reasoning behind the Mulligan article claim that 1.4 million Covid-19 deaths would cost society at least $6 trillion.
I have spent a fair amount of time in nursing homes, first doing some volunteer work and then visiting relatives.
If one of these fine souls dies, society saves years of Medicare and Social Security payments. Their children might get an inheritance sooner, and the inheritance might be larger because of less time spent in the nursing home. Very very few of the residents are writing books in their field or inventing anything,
I want to see generous treatment, but economically it is a gift.
It literally makes zero sense. This is them telling us the average life lost in that case to COVID-19 cost 4.3 million dollars. That number is just ridiculous. Nobody is going to spend even a million dollars to keep the average COVID-19 victim alive, and that victim will in no way produce even a million dollars in output over the lost years of life given the statistics we actually already have in hand. I think you can basically stop reading just based on that description.
I think it safe to assert that an American becomes a net financial drain at the point of retirement, which for most of us is going to be at least 67 years of age, and likely the point we start Medicare which is 65. COVID-19 is selectively killing such people.
My wife works at a charter school in Los Angeles. The teachers “see” their kids a minimum of twice a day and post lessons daily. Their work load has increased.
My grade school kid attends an LAUSD school where the teachers’ union made sure the teachers are not required to work more than 4 hours a day and can include planning and grading in those hours. Administrators are not allowed to supervise the instruction.
The only up side is at least her teachers have punted math to Kahn, so she gets some good instruction there and we are de facto home schooling.
I read a very cool article last month detailing some of the technical reasons why the virus was unlikely to be designed. I’m surprised the overview you linked to (#4 ,Vox story) discussing this hadn’t come across it. It’s a fun read:
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-not-human-made-in-lab.html
Basically arguing the attach mechanism to get into our cells didn’t work well in the models we have, so no one would have designed it that way. Doesn’t address the fairly pathological possibility someone somewhere has a better model, but it at least rules out copy-and-paste design work based existing virus models as the source.
If we learn the virus is laboratory-made in China, the best we can hope for, in the current political environment, is a trade war–possibly on a Smoot-Hawley scale. A hot war is not inconceivable.
Re: “and a limited response would lead to a $6 trillion loss of life”
Loss of life measured how? In North America I tend to see VSL (value of a statistical life), which takes no account of the fact that, for example, some folks are, alas, going to die within weeks anyhow.
Many other places use QALYs (quality-adjusted life-years) to help assess whether medical treatments are worthwhile, which makes vastly more sense than VSL. Because of the rising Covid age/death profile, perhaps an off-the-cuff model might suggest that it will cost most people (i.e. over around 25) around 4-6 weeks of life expectancy, tapering off somewhat for the under-25’s. (Note: for the over 65’s the reported median death age is around 80 which is mathematically impossible unless a great many of said casualties were about to die within weeks anyway.)
Since it looks like it will take 2-4 years to develop a vaccine (and that could even prove not to be possible; it seems like there’s a risk that vaccine candidates will sensitize people instead of immunizing them, analogous to, IIRC, dengue fever), I wonder how many years of enduring life diminished severely by house arrest are really worth those mere 4-6 weeks. If, say, a QALY under house arrest is really worth only 60% of a (near-)”normal” year, not very many at all. (And note that solitary confinement is considered torture in some contexts.) (And note that the longer we drag out the curve, the more the virus can mutate, find its way into wildlife, and become permanently endemic.)
Of course, the USA has a long, ugly, and unfortunate history with mindless Puritanism, so we aren’t socially allowed to discuss tradeoffs. It’s too utilitarian or something. One is only allowed discuss them under *foreign* socialized systems, despite all the current enthusiasm for socialism in the USA. The hypocrisy is far too thick to cut with a knife or even an axe.
No, in the idealized, hyper-Puritanical world of Twitter stars, tradeoffs simply don’t exist. The very thought is utterly unthinkable. Nonetheless, given fairly wide use of QALYs (or similar) in the “rest of the world”, I still wonder if it wouldn’t be far better to chuck the Puritanism than to embrace utterly lawless rule-by-decree.