1. Joshua Coven and Arpit Gupta write,
This paper uses mobile phone Global Positioning System (GPS) data to examine the mobility responses of neighborhoods in New York City affected by COVID-19. We show three key findings regarding differential mobility responses across neighborhoods. First, richer and younger neighborhoods see far greater increases in the propensity of individuals to leave the city, starting around March 14, 2020. These individual moves are well-proxied by networks of Facebook friends in the areas they move to, suggesting that richer and younger New York City residents are able to shelter in second homes and with friends and family away from the epicenter of the outbreak.
Which probably explains why Pennsylvania and Maryland have such high 3DDRRs right now. Just about every friend in Maryland that I have with kids who were living in New York has their kids staying with them right now. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
2. In the WSJ, Daniel Michaels writes,
“People have realized that with all the differences in testing, looking at all causes of death is a much better proxy for the impact of Covid,” said Lasse S. Vestergaard, an epidemiologist in Denmark’s national institute for infectious disease
Read the entire article, which raises several important issues.
3. In an essay on the current political climate, I write
Controversy over lockdowns has drawn people on both sides to demonize one another. Opponents of lockdowns assert that the virus is “just the flu,” implying that lockdown supporters are overreacting. Supporters of lockdowns assert that “all it takes to beat the virus is to have the fortitude to stay home and play video games,” implying that lockdown opponents are wimps.
4. Alberto Mingardi says that Italians enjoy less liberty than they did under Mussolini, but not because fascism has re-emerged as an ideology. He calls it “unintended authoritarianism.”
I would say the same thing about Lockdown Socialism. The legislators who voted for the CARES act and the people who think it is a good thing are not socialists. That makes it even scarier. I would rather fight an ideology than a consensus.
We adopted lockdowns and socialism as desperate short-term expedients. Neither approach is sustainable. But at least people are thinking about an exist strategy for the lockdowns. No one is even considering an exit strategy for the socialism.
5. A commenter points to this story.
The Medical Examiner-Coroner performed autopsies on two individuals who died at home on February 6, 2020 and February 17, 2020. Samples from the two individuals were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, the Medical Examiner-Coroner received confirmation from the CDC that tissue samples from both cases are positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).
February 6 is very early. It makes one wonder when the virus started infecting people there.
6. NPR story on the woes of colleges.
In the CARES relief package passed in March, Congress allocated about $14 billion for colleges and universities, though many have said that’s not enough. “Woefully inadequate” is what the American Council on Education called it. The group, along with 40 other higher education organizations, have lobbied Congress for about $46 billion more. And that’s a conservative ask, they say.
I predict that they get at least 75 percent of what they ask for. In Washington, you don’t mess with these guys.
7. Eyal Klement and others write,
Instead of using non93 discriminating measures targeted at the population as a whole, we propose regulated voluntary exposure of its low-risk members. Once they are certified as immune, these individuals return to the population, increase its overall immunity and resume their normal life. This approach is akin to avalanche control at ski resorts, a practice which intentionally triggers small avalanches in order to prevent a singular catastrophic one. Its main goal is to create herd immunity, faster than current alternatives, and with lower mortality rates and lower demand for critical health-care resources. Furthermore, it is also expected to be effective in relieving the huge economic pressures created by the current pandemic
They do some simulation exercises with a model and say that this will work. But the results are pretty much baked in, base on their assumptions that exposure creates immunity, that it will be easy to know when the people you expose have stopped shedding virus, and that people aged 20-49 are at low risk and thus can be safely exposed. Another assumption that I think is worth mentioning is that we don’t discover a good treatment for the virus over the next month or two. I wonder much we can trust those assumptions to be satisfied.
But note that lockdown is pretty much the opposite strategy. So implicitly we are making the opposite assumptions, and we should be wondering how much we can trust that.
Isn’t the exit strategy for “lockdown socialism” a vaccine?
For some viruses, it has taken over a decade to find a vaccine, and for some there is no vaccine. If that is the exit strategy, then as they in New York, fuggedaboudit
3) Ironically, despite the demonization on both sides, the CARES act passed with broad bi-partisan support. Can you model that?
And, for the record, I don’t support the CARES act. But, I do think that is was the most logical response that could be anticipated from a bloated, out of control government, which is what we have.
Well, there’s your model.
Amen! (But, something keeps this lacking for some odd reason)
That is a safe assumption.
The closest thing we might have to a small molecule drug treatment is remdesivir, and I looked up the details of its synthesis and Gilead’s statements about what might be available, and this won’t be available in the bulk quantity needed to treat the predicted numbers for at least late Summer, and it might not even be all that effective anyway.
There isn’t going to be a vaccine even chosen for scaleup and use for at least another 3 months, and this is assuming a vaccine is even possible for this virus, which isn’t a guarantee- you don’t have effective vaccines for other member of this family, nor other respiratory ailments caused by rhinoviridae, for example. I think it is fool’s errand to make a plan for shutting down until a vaccine arrives, and at the rate the virus is spreading even in lockdowns, it probably wouldn’t work even if you did get a vaccine in a year available to the public.
There are claimed treatments for the cytokine storm that is claimed to be the main cause of a lot of the deaths- namely anti-interleukin-6 antibodies and antagonists for the IL-6 receptor itself, but the evidence is all that convincing that this works. There are other targets for intervention in the immune response, but I don’t think you would find anything that works very quickly, and you would have to choose from things that already have FDA approval.
I have waiting to see the results of blood serum treatments derived from COVID-19 survivors, but nothing promising has been revealed that I have seen, and this makes me suspect it isn’t working well.
What about stem cell treatments to help with cytokine storms?
I thought that convalescent plasma was at least promising enough in case studies to try to do proper studies.
Also, to what extent might doctors simply better learn how to manage symptoms of the disease well enough to shorten duration and lower the fatality rate? Wasn’t the ventilator/oxygen protocol just changed due to ventilators doing more harm than good in a lot of patients? Might there be a couple of other things like this that change the calculus of trying to restrict the viruses spread versus the harms of restricting normal activities?
Here’s a UW cv19 tracking and modeling site, and they say the peak (expected, projected) was a week ago and it will mostly be over by Memorial Day (huge error bands though). We’ll see.
But of special interest is that they also guess we are now past the peak of hospital resource use, which means that particular rationale for restrictions to flatten the curve may be weakening, even assuming that all those resources are doing a lot of good.
The deaths numbers vary a bit from covidtracking, and it is probably a mistake at this point to work with higher than 2 or 3 digit precision about anything.
For the week ending 4/4, covidtracking had cv19-attributed 6,378 deaths, UW has 7,253 but CDC provisional death counts now show 6,955 for that week, and an additional 800 more pneumonia deaths than typical, but not classified as cv19.
6,400 to 7,800 (That is, 7100 +/- 10%) is quite a range for something we can count (dead bodies) and (theoretically) confirm one way or the other with testing, even if it’s on samples post-mortem.
CDC update for week ending 4/4, now 7,215 cv19 attributed, plus 900 excess pneumonia, but not attributed to cv19.
So now the range from covidtracking to CDC is 6,400 to 8,100. It’s kind of crazy that there’s a big question mark on the cause of death for 1,700 people in just that one week.
Klement et al approach needs serious attention. It does seem time tested by moms. Before vaccines, many moms intentionally exposed their young, healthy children to chickenpox, measles and mumps. The basic idea was to build immunity in kids with low risk of complications at a time convenient to a household and its resources. That way, the kids would have immunity. With immunity, moms didn’t have to worry about their kids getting sick at an inopportune time or in adulthood.