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Day 80: COVID-19 So Many Dimensions
The world is busy enumerating the pandemic. Data is being collected, cataloged, graphed, and published. Policymakers worldwide are struggling to discern how the data informs their next moves. The graph above is a composite of a 91-DIVOC graph of new cases/day of the various states in the US normalized for population differences. On the website, you can only highlight one state at a time. Here I have tried to highlight five. I had to pick five that were distinct enough on the graph that I would not make a total hash of a quick photoshop composite. It’s not a great job, but I think it does illustrate the point that any national graph is deceiving because the epidemic is pulsing through multiple locations at different rates and times.
And that highlights the data problem for policymakers: Aggregate the data too much and you miss significant developments; granulate the data too much and you miss the bigger picture. We are definitely in Goldilocks territory struggling to find the “just right” slice of data to inform and direct our next steps.
My own guess is that it can’t and won’t be found. We will just pull a Nike and “do it”. I expressed my own preferences in Day 77: COVID-19 Finding Our Way Out. Various commenters have expressed theirs. The debate no doubt goes on in all the households of the 95% of our own population that are subject to lockdown orders whether or not they are continuing to collect a paycheck. Certainly the families of those that are sick or who have died have reason to ponder the actions of our government and health officials.
And when this current outbreak is over the debate will not end. It will be the source of millions of articles, reports, and books in the future as the world tries to make sense of this event. It has so many dimensions:
- the death toll and chronic illnesses amongst the “recovered”
- the role of public health officials in policymaking
- the performance of health care providers
- the logistics of critical care supplies and medicines
- the development of new therapies and pharmaceuticals
- the performance of regulators of relevant aspects of the health care response
- national supply sources of critical goods and materials
- the pandemic’s impact on global trade policies
- the economic recession and recovery of various nations
- the success and failure of pandemic modelers
And no doubt there are many other dimensions that we may yet discover. Will governments fall? Will the second wave be smaller or greater than the first? Will the European Union dissolve? And on and on it goes.
For the moment we contend with the inconsistencies of government decision-making as Craig Medred describes in discussing how various jurisdictions are permitting or controlling outside exercise, we observe the debate between neighbors Norway and Sweden over their different approaches to the epidemic, we ask why the Green New Dealers are silent as we have trashed our current economy and seem ripe to reformulate it in recovery, and we watch how an early exemplar of getting it right — Singapore — contemplates its response to a second wave.
So many terrible, intriguing, and consequential dimensions.
[Note: Links to all my CoVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
The economic cost of the shutdown will be so large as to dwarf any possible benefit. We will eventually be able to identify the cost on the economy per life saved by not getting COVID, and it won’t be pretty. A quick and dirty calculation of the last 3 weeks’ worth of first time unemployment claims results against the US number of deaths at the same point in time suggests that the shutdown–in terms of wages alone–wiped out something just short of $25 billion, an amount equal to the expected lifetime earnings of 12 and 2/3rds thousand Millennials compared to 8 and 1/2 thousand mostly Boomers and Silent Generation members.
Another thing I looked up was my state’s vital statistics reports. Over the last few year, pneumonia was listed as the cause of death for approximately 160 per million population. The current deaths per million from COVID-19 is 6.2. Only New York and New Jersey have anything higher than that, at 322.2 and 169.3, respectively. The US total is 44.8. At some point in the future, most of the COVID-19 deaths will be lumped in with pneumonia, as are Influenza cases. With the shutdown, I’m guessing that total deaths from all causes for 2020 will look a lot like all the previous years.
So, New York flattened their curve fifteen days ago? If that’s true, how come they’re still screaming “emergency”? Does it mean that “flattening the curve” isn’t actually a solution to medical shortages, or does it mean that New York’s government just enjoys screaming?
Their economists finally got around to explaining the tax impact of the shutdown…
Former NYT writer Alex Berenson was interviewed on Fox News. His twitter feed is interesting. He is questioning the narrative on the corona virus.
We are told that the difference is that the normal rate of pneumonia deaths are spread out across the year (or, probably more accurately, across the “flu season” of about September through April), and the COVID-19 deaths have been concentrated in about two months or less.
I’ve been following him on Twitter and he’s smart, despite being a former NYTer.
I suppose one silver lining (if you can call it that) is that we will come out of this pandemic with a huge amount of data, vastly more than we have about any comparable past pandemic. It doesn’t help us now, because it’s simultaneously too much to process and too incomplete to draw any conclusions from. But in the years and decades to come, after there has been time to compile and analyze, we will have the ability to construct a very detailed picture of what happened.
I don’t suppose it will actually settle anything, because there will always be unknowns (especially about what would have happened if we’d handled things differently). But you can be sure that, when the next pandemic happens, this one will be used as a model either of how to respond or how not to respond. (Probably both.)
It feels to me like the worst of the pandemic is over. The weather is warming up right on schedule. It will be a balmy 59 degrees on Sunday in New York City. :-) The kids will be sent out to play next week, and people’s thoughts will turn to vacation. I think Trump was right when he said Easter would be the turning point.
It will take the economy a few weeks to get back to normal, and I’m not sure how the travel and leisure industries will restart. I keep thinking of the bed bug problem of a decade ago. :-) They will surely be taking housekeeping and disinfecting more seriously than they have been.
Inflation will ensue for sure because of the cost of this virus. But we’ll survive that. It will make many people happy to know that the U.S. debt to China will be paid back in inflated dollars worth a little less than what they lent us. :-)
My husband and I have been laughing on and off over the last few weeks remembering a funny family story. When the kids were little–son at 6 and daughters at 12 and 14–we went out for brunch one Sunday after church. The 12-year-old looked down at the top of her little brother’s head and saw–egads!–lice. My word. Screaming and hysteria ensued. The girls spent the rest of the day and evening washing every single piece of clothing and bedding they had! Total mayhem all day. It really was funny.
Elementary schools react the same way to lice infestations. I was chatting with our elementary school principal about it one afternoon, and wow, what an expert he was on the subject of head lice. The areas of knowledge he had to acquire to do his job. :-)
We all have an inner germaphobe. The Good Lord did that on purpose. Sometimes our psyche overreacts with fear and horror the same way the human immune system overreacts sometimes. :-) Usually it is a good horror for us to have.
As is true for head lice, all the measures we’ve taken so far and will take going forward are sound and necessary. And I think it won’t be long now before we have some important control systems in place and we can get back to normal living. :-) Sadder, wiser, but living and celebrating and making money as we were doing before this happened. :-)
There is no avoiding substantial economic damage with a pandemic. Without any government orders, when faced with a brand new easily transmissible deadly disease, people are going to seek out information on how to avoid it, how to protect their loved ones from it, and stop going to restaurants and movies and work, etc…not to mention those who do get sick.
I don’t doubt the gov. orders have increased the economic harm, but let’s not pretend that the economy would be sailing along smoothly without them.
@daventers, absolutely fair point. The pandemic was going to have an adverse economic impact. The difference I imagine is that you are flying a jet and the engine starts missing and power become intermittent. You are losing altitude but still flying. If you think the answer is to shut off the engine in midair and restart it, well that’s an interesting and risky strategy.
FIFY
I think there is a #11 – what has been the impact of the panic-mongering Democrat party and media on the economy and the psychological well being of the country.
My Governor (Northam) shut things down until June 10 instead of picking shorter intervals to re-assess the situation. Now, the question of postponing proposed tax increases has come up. THAT, he wants to assess at shorter intervals!
That is an interesting question. So, just for fun I looked up the last two pandemics that affected the US, the 1957-58 H2-N2 “Asian Flu” and the 1968 H3-N2 “Hong Kong Flu.” The CDC estimates 100,000 and 116,000 US deaths, respectively. That works out to approximately 501.7 and 681.0 deaths per million. There were no recessions surrounding the 1968 outbreak, and the wage and salary portion of personal income grew every month in 1968 and 1969. (Bureau of Economic Analysis data). In addition, total nonfarm employment in the US grew every month in 1968 and all but September and November in 1969. So, whatever the negative impact of the 1968 pandemic, it did not result in a recession or a reduction of total goods and services. The 1957-58 experience is more mixed. The US economy peaked in August, 1957 and the recession lasted until April, 1958. From that peak, nonfarm employment shed a little over 2.2 million jobs until the labor market started to pickup in July ’58. The unemployment rate increased from 4.1% to 7.5% during that period. Real GDP growth was -4.1% and -10% for 1957:Q4 and 1958:Q1, respectively. I can’t find a lot on any public health strategies to mitigate this flu, except for a mention that the Surgeon General did not want to create a panic within memory of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. As for the Hong Kong Flu, the CDC says “In the winter of 1968–69, the virus spread around the world; the effect was limited and there were no specific containment measures.”
So where are we with COVID-19? Using the initial 2.2 million and a more recent 100,000 US deaths, we get between 6,614 and 301 deaths per million. We’ve also got nearly 17 million unemployed, so far. Early estimates of the impact on US GDP for the second quarter are for a 10% to 20% decline, after a 3% to 4% drop in the first quarter. What happened between 1957 and 1968 and now? COVID-19 looks to be perhaps no worse in terms of loss of life than 1957 or 1968. Perhaps it is that we know more about what we don’t know, and the Chinese and media helped spread the fear?
You are correct that things vary by region. I have been tracking how well the IMHE model predictions on daily US deaths posted at the beginning of the month have been doing versus actuals. The plot below shows the low, medium, high predictions as well as the actuals as of April 9. The thick green line represents the updated prediction of April 6.
In the midst of fighting a house fire, one downstairs bedroom ablaze, the firemen stop to consider, “Gosh, this is causing a lot of damage. Perhaps we should stop fighting the fire.”
Stop blaming the firemen for the damage that the fire is causing.
Or maybe, in the midst of a house fire, one downstairs bedroom ablaze, the firemen stop to consider, and then say “Let’s set fire to the rest of the houses on this block so they’ll all be in the same condition.”
I disagree. The information from China and Italy, if you don’t trust China, pretty much showed who the vulnerable were. And the sector most vulnerable are not in the working population. We could have taken measures to protect those first. They are still the vulnerable and are warned not to see grandchildren. It must just be a coincidence that when first resturants and then non essential businesses were closed, the unemployment rate jumped exponetially, the stock market crashed, business owners are predicting bankruptcy, and trillions in bail out money is being printed non stop.
I don’t understand looking at what happened in Italy and concluding that the economy would have been just fine if not for the stay-at-home orders. People would still have panicked and stayed home.
The natural dynamics of who the virus attacks seem to be pretty consistent. The elderly and those with health conditions still constitute a large majority of the victims. That is a huge clue as to where to start with who to protect from exposure. I didn’t panic and don’t plan on it.
We have historic examples like in 2009 with the swine flu.
CDC data for Feb 2 up to April 9 show COVID 19 deaths of 4065, deaths from all causes 501,444, 88 percent of expected deaths, all pnuemonia deaths 35,230, deaths with pneumonia and Covid 19 1,879 and flu deaths 4,467. The CDC reporting lags because of the time death certificates are filed. But, you can see, we are at 88% of the expected deaths up to this time of year.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
I don’t think this information would have much of an impact on people’s decisions. Where we are with overall expected deaths this year has nothing to do with how risky any particular act is. If you are, or have a loved one who is in a vulnerable category (which is a huge portion of the population), you are not likely going to risk exposing them to a disease that has killed nearly 20,000 people in the last 6 weeks or so, regardless of what else might be going on with the death statistics in the country. In fact, the reason that number of deaths is as low as it is may well be because fewer people are taking risks with it.
And, of course, it’s not just the deaths that have an economic impact. Huge numbers of otherwise healthy people are hospitalized for this thing, sometimes for weeks. That is also something people will go to lengths to avoid, and also something that has a huge economic impact.
I beg to differ that huge numbers of otherwise healthy people are hospitalized with this. In Michigan, 8% of CASES are under 50 yrs.. I know it is bad, my niece has been intabating people in Detroit. Yet, the county I live in and the one next to me that has the hospital still had no cases listed as of yesterday. My county has 16 people per square mile. And the governor of Michigan line item vetoed rural hospital money from the budget, which really didn’t help prepare for this. My niece is working her butt off, and my sister, a RN in Traverse City applied for unemployment this week. First time in her 60 years she has had to do that. It will be interesting times.
If the firemen are in the wrong house, I might consider blaming them.
I agree but the key difference is choice vs mandate. This is non trivial distinction.
Here is where I disagree. People who live in rural areas or low population density counties would not have panicked and stayed home.
If we have a nursing shortage in America, why are we laying off nurses?
We’ll come out of this with fewer health care facilities and professionals because of the government overreaction.
I’m sure you know, but when the prediction models said we had to flatten the curve, we had to match cases with hospital capacity, and the model said we were way under capacity, so, using that as a given, hospitals worked on getting census down, canceled all elective procedures, surgeries and turned those areas into COVID units, kind of like if you build it they will come. Still waiting for the surge. Her hospital started that in mid March. So going from about 60-80 surgeries a day to 10 (and that is where hospitals make money), it takes less nurses, and doctors. Everybody thinks doctors are rich and don’t matter, but that is definitely not true. Hospitals are probably going to need bailing out after this also.
And if the fire was out last week, I would certainly want them to stop watering.
True, although I don’t think the fire is out yet, or even under control. But we seem to be getting close enough that it’s time to be planning how to loosen the restrictions. Carefully.
Nearly 7% of the workforce in my state filed for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks. This includes 19% of the all workers in the “Accommodation and Food Services,” 15% in the “Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation,” 25% of “Other Services,” and perhaps surprisingly 6% of “Health Care and Social Assistance” workers. Some of these industries are shedding workers exponentially.