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UK: The Fight against COVID-19: An Update from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
A month ago, I interviewed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just as the COVID-19 crisis was shuttering the economy and governments were ordering citizens to shelter at home. In that interview, Dr. Bhattacharya mentioned that he himself would soon be conducting tests for COVID in Santa Clara County, California, one of the most active hotspots in the country. Today Dr. Bhattacharya returns to discuss the results of that study and one currently under way in partnership with Major League Baseball. We also discuss some signs of hope, and specifics about how the economy can be restarted safely and efficiently. Dr. Bhattacharya also gives some (unsolicited) advice to Dr. Anthony Fauci, California governor Gavin Newsom, and president Donald Trump.
Recorded on Zoom on April 17th, 2020.
Published in General
How comparable are current COVID-19 antibody tests to flu antibody prevalence? Dr Bhattacharya noted that the presence of antibodies does not guarantee immunity. But do we need to know if a person is immune or not if the mortality rate is comparable to flu viruses? Is it enough to know how many people have some antibodies or do we need to verify immunity?
I need an asst. And about 4 or 5 more hours in the day. Among other things.
I still like Jonah, though I find him aggravating more than half the time, on the limited occasions when I now check. I worry that The Dispatch has turned out to be an echo chamber, in which Goldberg, French, and Hayes may tend to reinforce their worst tendencies. This is a shame, because I actually like all three.
Right now, a lot of attention is on mortality rates. Ultimately, the more important statistic is total COVID-related deaths.
There is reasonable debate over those numbers. Incentives for over-reporting exist. Also, per usual, thorough autopsies are not performed on every person who dies, so we will remain reliant on the judgments of individual physicians. They will decide if an untested case was more likely COVID-19 or another virus. They will decide whether or not a person was in such poor health already that COVID-19 was a cause but not the most immediate cause.
Nevertheless, mortality rate does not neatly translate into a measure of danger by itself. If two diseases have an equal likelihood of killing the infected but one is significantly more infectious, it will result in more deaths because the mortality rate applies to a larger population. Herd immunity will eventually play a role, but doesn’t yet.
All of this is just to say that the mortality rate is necessary for policy decisions but will not give us a final estimate of total deaths. It will be 6-12 months, I’d guess, before we can say how the death count compares to previous flu seasons.
I think the shutdown was too broad and far too heavy-handed, and I favored an alternative strategy of mitigation (as I wrote about here).
However, I can’t say with confidence that a fairly extreme shutdown, at least in the hardest-hit regions, wasn’t a good idea. Counterfactuals are always hard to argue, and we don’t really know what would have happened had we not slowed the spread of the virus in March and early April. Even today we don’t know what aspects of the shutdown, if any, actually slowed the spread. We might have experienced the critical care shortages that were feared, or perhaps not. I can easily excuse those who feared the worst if no action was taken.
David French is a vortex of grief on Twitter. It didn’t matter so much when he was at NRO. Maybe all publicity is good publicity in this situation.
The economic consequences are not unknown unknowns. They are known knowns, though they are not precisely quantified.
Politicians do not dissent because they know that much of the public is unable to handle the facts, or face the facts. The politicians face a hysterical panic. They must react accordingly, or they will not remain in charge.
I think that this is what the President did, and I think that he did it about as well as was possible. Give in to the hysteria briefly, since there is no choice, and then when the catastrophic predictions do not come true, try to get everyone back to work ASAP.
I like this. Dead-on.
This is what I think.
There will be known consequences and unknown consequences.
Economic forecasting is like weather forecasting. Even the most knowledgable can only describe systems involved and make general predictions. There are too many immeasurable and dynamic variables involved to be precisely modeled. And weather is not subject to psychological or political influences.
There is no precedent in the history of a modern global economy for what has occurred. This scenario is not a mere exaggeration of normal events and processes. In some ways, it is not as severe as other pandemic situations. But the US economy was not structured in 1918 like our current economy. The culture has changed and with it our responses. And this is a global, nearly instant and simultaneous disruption.
Not all consequences will be bad. There will be opportunities and incentives for corrections. But we are on the edge of a whirlwind. Many surprises will emerge before the year is done.
There isn’t one debt to GDP figure on the planet that isn’t in record territory or close. Supposedly, the next level above junk debt is double the historical record volume. Then add in the fact that the rating agencies are 99% worthless.
I heard someone suggest the best way to punish China for this is to write off our public debt to them.
It’s all about keeping the music playing and ignoring how many chairs have been taken off the floor. By common consent the music will play; there are no walls high enough to stave off a reckoning if everything crashes.
I have absolutely zero idea if this would be a good thing to squash the Commies. I don’t know how many knock on effects there are, but I hope we are looking at it.
The problem is China has so many spies and computer crap they can attack us with.
Everyone needs to have some gold, bitcoin, and cash.
The whole system is idiotic. Every Western government plus China requires inflation. The financial system requires inflation. But we are supposed to trade with the world because it reduces prices. It gives everyone purchasing power. Then throw in the purchasing power from automation. This is called DEFLATION. Better living through purchasing power. Then throw in the fact that the aging population in the West and China spends less because they are old. Medicare has them covered right? The Chinese just die off.
You guys are all smarter than me. Poke holes in what I just said.
Every central bank is going to try to create asset inflation until the populace realizes they have no idea what they are doing. That is what is going to happen. The federal reserve is already buying junk bonds and municipal bonds.
Then the bond market collapses. There is just too much debt. It will be a debt deflation after they can’t create inflation.
Bitcoin? Are you sure about that :-)
Chris Dauer?
The issue is the market cap is under Home Depots. There are all kinds of people on this planet that need more dependable money and block chain. I don’t have any yet myself, but I think I’m gonna have to get it done.
Whitehouse.gov has a link to transcripts of all news briefings and comments. (Don’t look for it in covid19 link there. That is general info only).
Had the great pleasure of sitting in on a taping of Uncommon Knowledge on a National Review cruise….even better in person.
We are seeing that people will only tolerate it so long and it can’t prevent the illness from spreading. Locking people up and shutting down the economy sooner would have led to people losing patience sooner, before the virus peaked, and the economy sustaining more damage.
Downside is making our country into a more risky investment.
The Chinese have screwed everyone on this planet and we all know it. Using our legal system to hold them libel for the scourge they have perpetrated would not be what makes this country a more risky investment, imho. Suddenly spending multiple trillions of dollars when we are already 22 trillion in debt…well THAT makes our country a more risky investment.
A big part of why our excessive debt is not crushing is that we have always been such a reliable payor on our obligations (even to enemies) that purchasers of our debt are willing to accept lower interest rates for the relatively sure thing of payback. (I seem to recall this issue came up with Great Britain sometime early in our history, perhaps the war of 1812.)
If we ever began a practice of defaulting on debt, we would need to pay greater interest rates to attract sufficient purchasers of our debt. That could be a disaster. The deeper we are in debt, the greater the risks to us from any increase in the interest rates we pay on debt.
There are surely other better ways to penalize China that are not as great a threat to ourselves.
One starting suggestion worth considering is whether the children of members of the Chinese Communist Party are permitted visas to come into the U.S. to get degrees at our universities. That is one way to get the attention of the CCP members. It is the decision makers that need to feel the pinch.