Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: 1918 Flu | Hacker News Reader

Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: 1918 Flu

papers.ssrn.com

66 pointslnguyen56 comments

This is ridiculous. Any economic effect of the 1918 flu is overpowered by the end of WWI.

And the 1918 flu was followed by one of the most prosperous periods in history: the roaring 20s.

The response to the 1918 flu was also not very centralized. Different states and cities did different things, a strategy which is today being deplored by the media and certain segments of the population. Since the response is significantly more centralized today (entire states being shutdown, which has not happened before), I'm not sure you can draw the same conclusions. It's one thing to have one shutdown city in a country full of working cities. It's quite another thing to have them all shut down at the same time, as well as the entire world.

That's why the results are in relative terms. A city or state that is slow to react will do worst than a faster or more effective one in relative terms.

About shutting down everything, yes. If absolutely no one works, then who drives the trucks. But that's not what is happening today either.

The very title of this paper suggests a deeply flawed conclusion. A sample size of one pandemic, from 100 years ago even, is used to generalize a conclusion that "Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not". Sure, there were multiple cities with varying levels of interventions, but you can only conclude that in the 1918 economy for that specific pandemic, the health interventions were good for the economy at that point in time.

I also agree with the other commenter that it may be better to see some research prior to December 2019.

Are you implying that we can’t draw conclusions from limited data sets? Surely there must be some value in looking at the last event, even if it was 100 years ago...

What value did you have in mind?

You have to think about confounding factors when considering only one event. The effects of the 1918 flu are completely overshadowed by the end of WWI. Thus you can't really draw many conclusions.

You can't control for that effect?

There's no control group for a single event.

They are comparing different cities that both went through WWI ending, so I think it would require a reason to believe WWI would affect different cities differently to be a threat to validity. Certainly one could imagine there might be such reasons and it is worth discussing them, but presumably that would require looking at the specific cities in the paper which I presume no one here (including me) has done.

But it's not quite fair to compare two different cities in an economy where only some cities are shut down. If New York shuts down but can still purchase goods from LA, then that's a remarkably different situation than the entire country being shut down, which is essentially what is going on now.

You cannot study the cities in isolation. They are not self-sufficient economies. It's possible that one city was able to isolate because it depended on the other cities to be working to receive its goods and to jump-start its economy after the isolation. These effects cannot be ignored, and are substantially different than today, when it's not just that most states are shut down but also that most countries are shut down (well the ones of economic significance, anyway).

But if the effect of WWI across different cities is random, and not correlated with the explanatory variables, then the study can still work despite WWI affecting the target variable. It'll just be part of the error term.

No, the study used a cross-section, not a single observation.

Are there any papers coming to a similar conclusion that were released prior to December 2019? Just in case there's some bias from the current moment. Not saying there's necessarily any evidence of such in this one, but it'd be interesting to compare, at least.

Well, we are currently running a global experiment to find out whether it is better for the economy to be negligent or have a robust public heath response during a pandemic. We'll know soon.

I would argue that in this context, you can't make conclusions about "the economy" in terms of objective good or bad. There are economies at varying topographies, scales, and market sectors. There are also philosophical differences in what a desirable economy looks like. For example, there's an increasing number of opinions that an economy heavily based on oil and gas energy, and military defense contractors, is not a desirable one.

Some others in a very small minority (possibly happening to be in power) may argue that parts of the economy that are not resilient to hardship are not desirable parts, and therefore should be culled when the opportunity presents itself. I would not be surprised if this was a factor in the decisions being made right now.

Different economies have different amount of money to loose. You can't compare apples to oranges.

In China, which has way more to loose from the real economy going down, nobody is running to sell their business now. A factory during a crisis, is still a factory.

Now look how many people have cashed out in USA already, despite US economy being much more virtual, and service based, and supposedly more resilient.

We are much more likely see whose economy is more resilient, and not whose immediate response was better.

Panic factor? Chinese are by far more freaked out now than most Americans. Even now, Americans trust their government more than Chinese to CPC.

Illiquid assets factor? No, you can sell a factory in China way faster than you can sell a typical dotcom in America.

It's really just Chinese still looking up to seek more fortunes more than American business people do, and America being way more vulnurable to panic buy/sells.

And it's only the last point above, where an immediate response matters: In a society more susceptible to mass panic among the business elites, you can reduce the impact by increasing their confidence by showing competent early response.

It's not clear to me why a 'service-based' economy should be expected to weather a pandemic better than a 'factory-based' economy. In the plants I've worked in, you could clock in, do your work, then go home without ever talking to anybody. The work was not particularly incompatible with social/physical distancing. On the other hand, face-to-face human interaction is central to much of the 'service-economy.'

An ounce of prevention...

when did the spanish flu become the 1918 flu? was it in the past few days?

1918 Flu is a more accurate name and you seem to not have had any trouble with the meaning, so what's the problem?

The problem is that it was being referred to as the Spanish Flu up until some people in the media took offense to Trump's coining of the phrase "Chinese Flu", so Spanish Flu needs to go if we're not wanting to look like hypocrites.

I don't see how striving for consistency by avoiding nation-shaming labels is a "problem". Trying to not be hypocritical is generally viewed as a good thing.

Exactly - it's society going "You're right, that's not cool." then trying to be better. I fully encourage it.

Revising terminology seems to run contrary to a strive for consistency.

Tell that to World War I

Why is this a problem?

Because it confuses people and ostracizes those who are not following along actively. It's like calling water dihydrogen monoxide. Not problematic, just not what it's called.

But languages evolve over time due to societal pressure. Words used a generation or two ago to describe some race are now largely gone, for good reason. When you see someone trying to weaponize a word - and it feels incredibly dishonest to say Trump's insistence on "China Flu" is anything but an attempt to generate an adversary, as he hasn't shown any sort of insistence on using the "right" word for anything before this - it only makes sense to try and react against it.

Trump says China virus, not "China Flu". This is not an influenza strain.

> say Trump's insistence on "China Flu" is anything but an attempt to generate an adversary

Trump is just calling it what everyone called it before WHO decided to call it COVID 19 or nCov-SARS2, or whatever the virus is called according to them. The rest of the media was using Wuhan coronavirus or Chinese coronavirus since December.

Sorry, China virus. So you're telling me instead that the president can't keep up with the modern word choice? Clearly the world and its leaders have moved on from that, but the US is willing to hold diplomatic relations up in an attempt to re-frame the conversation.

https://www.axios.com/wuhan-virus-pompeo-g7-statement-corona...

I wouldn’t blame trump’s blatant racism on some people in the media

Calling it the Chinese Flu because it comes from China is only racist when you move the goal posts to redefine racism as such. There is evidence that this was what happened due to pandemics traditionally being named after where they originated.

You can't move the goal posts without the media being on board with it.

> There is evidence that this was what happened due to pandemics traditionally being named after where they originated.

This is just false, most pandemics are named for where they had their greatest effects, or for really old ones, who wrote about it / was king at the time.

Before modern history, we had no idea where pandemics originated.

What do you think Trump would be calling it if it originated in the US... the "US Flu" or "COVID-19"?

You know 100% why he is calling it the chinese flu. Don't try to be so naive that he is trying to "properly" name it, even though every other person on the planet calls it the scientific name. You know he calls it the chinese flu to distance himself AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE from any responsibility for the effects of it. He blames someone else 100% of the time no matter what. 3+ years into his presidency have you seen how much he blames the obama administration for trumps lack of initial response?

Actually, Trump calling it "Chinese Virus" seems to track exactly with the CCP planting those silly stories about the virus being created by the U.S. military. Now that they seem to be toning that rhetoric down, he has also stopped calling it "Chinese Virus."

I think he calls it that to take a jab at the CCP, and possibly left/media for fun.

> "There is evidence that this was what happened due to pandemics traditionally being named after where they originated."

Related aside, 'Ebola' might have been 'Yambuku' instead, named for the village where the disease was first noticed, but Peter Piot decided to name it after the nearby Ebola River instead, to avoid damning the small village's name.

He definitely didn't name it 1976 Virus though. Oh, and would you look at that -- the precursor to the Ebolavirus we know today was called "Sudan Virus," turns out it's not racist, it's just how these things are named!

Sometimes. Depends. Did it already have a name that everyone was already using and then you went out of your way to call it “China virus”, when your personal brand also just happens to be based on racist dog whistles and stoking xenophobia? Is so, it’s probably racist!

I remember seeing it widely called the 1918 flu when there was a flurry of articles discussing it in November 2018.

It was referred to as either one until very recently. There was recently an attempt to rename this article on Wikipedia, in March 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spanish_flu#1918_flu,_not...

For the record, Spanish flu was not named so because anyone believed it came from Spain, but because, in the midst of WWI, Spain was neutral and the only heavily-affected country that allowed reporting on the severity of the flu.

One hypothesis of its origin was the UK or USA. Maybe you should instead be calling it British flu or American flu.

"Atypical pneumonia associated with Legionella bacterial infection" is also a more accurate name than "Legionnaires' disease", but rewriting the historical nomenclature that way would be confusing and a bit obnoxious, especially if done to make some political point.

And no, using the name "Legionnaires' disease" isn't a slur on the American Legion.

It's sort of a revisionist history thing that's been picking up steam for a while.

I believe it really started gaining traction when the articles and such started going around about how it was called "Spanish Flu" because Spain was a neutral country in WWI and so wasn't suppressing reporting on the pandemic. Current research suggests it was just as bad everywhere and probably originated in America.

I don't terribly mind the change, I guess, since 1918 Flu helps ground it in time.

I think part of the change is also backlash to people calling our current pandemic the Chinese Flu

Perhaps it is to be PC, apparently the Spanish flu didn't originate from Spain (looks like it began in US). Spain was the first country to report on it.

And now the academy desperately tries to save face, as the COVID-19 pandemic starts to wind down, and the consequences of all the panic caused by the academy start to play out. This year will be remembered as the end of modern academia.

Is it winding down? Most of the US seems to be at early days of exponential growth still. Only a handful of countries seem to have things under control and even those places still have restrictions in place.

How are you concluding things are winding down?

It's my own prediction. Check back in a year, by which time SARS-CoV-2 will be just another endemic strain of coronavirus.

Let’s check back in a month... Hospitals in New York are just starting to run out of ventilators. Italy who is two weeks ahead of us, appears to have just hit their peak. But they still aren’t slowing down. Very strange prediction.

But prediction based on what data? I see these types of predictions and I’m trying to understand how they come about.

>It's my own prediction

Based on what. Your gut? Ok Trump.

Look at how fast it's continuing to the spread in the US even with all the drastic measures which have taken place in some areas. If you can't imagine what it would be like without these unprecedented closures then I'm not sure what else to say to you.

I can imagine it, and I'm more afraid of the economic impact than the virus.

What is your prediction based on? I really hope we're not still in this in a year. I work in soho in NYC and still have to go and handle stuff at the shop and the city is crazy right now.

“This” is looking more and more like a virus which is extremely contagious but about as deadly as a bad cold. The author of the Imperial College study which led to shutdowns in the UK and US recently revised his estimates and is now saying that the R0 value (a measure of contagiousness) is higher than previously thought, “just over three” is the latest. This would mean that lots of people have already been infected, and it’s not nearly as deadly as everyone thinks.

The flip side is that we’d have a very hard time eradicating it, and if humans can’t acquire permanent immunity it will be around basically forever, like most other cold viruses.

But even if we assume it's no more deadly than a bad flu, doesn't it being novel and hence no immunity at all in the population, give it a much higher impact than the flu?

I mean regardless of the actual CFR and R0 value, we can take a look at Wuhan, Spain, Italy and now increasingly likely NY to see the impact. I'm not an expert but I don't think a bad seasonal flu overwhelms the local hospitals. And this is with extraordinary measures being taken to boost hospital capacity already.

> I don't think a bad seasonal flu overwhelms the local hospitals.

Happens all the time, most recently during the 2017-2018 season in parts of the US: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

Also keep in mind that COVID-19 would be quite a bit more contagious than the flu (so it would spread more rapidly) if this theory is correct.

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