US states set to reopen as coronavirus could push jobless rate to 16%
reuters.com
reuters.com
Why even have intelligence services, scientific expertise, governments, infectious disease agencies and emergency plans if they are all ignored until it is too late. I don't understand how so many countries messed this up.
The right answer is SIP plus invest massively in building out testing and contact tracing capacity so you can reopen while replacing SIP with targeted quarantines of the infected and exposed.
There's no painless answer, and there's no answer as good as a better early response would have been, but there's a pretty clear right answer.
It's really not hard to understand why this played out the way it did.
More zero-hour contracts? You betcha.
Also quitting due to significant change in work agreement is a valid reason for unemployment benefits.
Every state is probably different.
This doesn't sound, to me, like a very ethical experiment given that the cost of waiting it out for another two-ish months is comparatively easily calculated and not terribly "doomsday" in scope. Whereas a return to the days of late March where the death count was doubling twice a week very much... is.
Now... in practice? The "lockdown" won't really be released like that in these states, because people aren't going to be willing to travel or dine even if it's "legal". So these states will probably see a moderately worst outbreak and see moderately better results, and we'll all get to continue these arguments forever.
Probably. Or it could be a total disaster. I wouldn't bet on that result, exactly, but I wouldn't be shocked if it happened either.
For evidence: consider pork production. That is an "essential" industry. It's never been "locked down". Yet per the news today I see that 25% of the industry is effectively shut down by viral outbreaks anyway. That's what we should expect if we insist people go to work -- unexpected, uncontrolled outbreaks in locations and businesses and industries. We're not going to get to anything resembling a normal economy.
Or, possibly but not probably: the cost of opening up is vastly higher if we end up looking at 2-300k needlessly dead Americans.
Some things to consider is also the type of deaths. Now I haven't calculated myself which decision is the correct one here, but just throwing out some factors that might (or might not) be favourable towards the decision to open markets sooner.
If most people who die are elderly and they would die in few years anyway are these deaths comparable to younger people who commit suicides or die from poverty due to recession - who otherwise might be productive members of society for the following 30 years?
If 75%+ of people who die are non-working elderly and maybe 80-90% of those would have died in the following 0-8 years would that mean 0-8 years of saved resources/care/medicine costs meaning economy would be better off and in the following 0-8 years we can expect proportionally fewer deaths?
Probably more factors here, but I would like to go to the next point now...
The steps on how to decide should be:
1. Predict deaths (and what kind of deaths) for each following week/month due to economic recession, plus any other damages. Lost technological advancements etc which can indirectly also mean more deaths. Consider all the things that can indirectly cause deaths. There's also decrease in some type of deaths like traffic accidents during quarantine. Should we consider these?
I tried to Google for how many deaths 2008 caused - first thing I found was 260,000 extra cancer deaths, but I have no idea about validity: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/economic-do... This is 2.5x more than current deaths from coronavirus and probably within more productive demographic. Just citing that to suggest there's some possibility that recession could cause more deaths.
2. Consider the pace on how fast can hospitals increase their capability to handle steeper curve.
3. Predict how fast Corona would spread after opening. How would hospitals fare? Would this mean more deaths overall from Corona or same amount as if we had keeping a flatter curve. I think the only real way to know this is to start touching the waters, so in this case it seems like reasonable to try with few places first and get measurements from there to see if it's worth it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
(even if you don't agree with that metric, equivalence at some ratio is pretty clear, unless old people are just completely disposable)
At the moment it seems that individual susceptibility is a bigger factor than medical capacity, and we are researching dozens of possible treatments and working towards a vaccine. Makes it even harder to gauge the trade offs, as an effective treatment would pay big dividends when combined with a slowed spread.
I also wonder about attributing poverty deaths to economic shut downs. They are pretty preventable, and more a failure of our broader society than a result of the specific policy. The societal failure when it comes to suicide is less direct, but it's a factor there also.
But this is always the case. If you can't solve this issue during normal times, how could you solve this issue during crisis? Force part of the society to pay more taxes during this time? There's certainly a lot of people dying all over the world due to poverty - these deaths could be prevented as well. Since there's less production things are probably even more scarce and expensive during crisis - if economy is shut down and people can't be productive.
Regarding ethical/moral dilemmas, to me it seems like the trolley problem is definitely highlighted during this crisis (it to some extent exists also during normal times), but now it's extremely apparent in my opinion.
Especially because also another question is very apparent - how valuable are different human lives?
Loosening economy means less deaths within general population, while it means more deaths specifically for elderly. Loosening isn't binary either so there's a balanced line that you have to draw. So you have to draw that balance between somewhere where you have to weigh economic damage, young productive human lives vs lives that are about to end anyway.
For instance. Would you save 20 people who were expected to live 1 year compared to a person who would go on to live 40 years?
If we considered years and probably higher quality years it would be 40 > 20 however death count would be 1 < 20
Or people can go to an Oklahoma restaurant packed shoulder-to-shoulder without masks with their governor and expedite the restart the pandemic curve to end up with 100k more deaths.
People dying costs money, both in the lost productivity of the dead and reduced productivity among those emotionally affected. More people will die with an early end to lockdown than would if it was maintained for another month or two.
I expect lots of grim economics research to come out of this.
Rural areas that are less impacted may reopen with little risk. More urban areas need to be more careful.
I don't think it's necessary to spread fear about reopening. Hopefully your local authority is well-informed enough to make good decisions regarding reopening.
The last I heard one of the county public health officials say anything, it was that they don't have enough testing to know what is going on in the community.
This means that any costs are just advanced 2 years.
But since those 86 year olds do not provide value to the economy at this point, only consume resources, it will probably offset that by some margin. 2 years worth of resources and care.
Very simplistic way to look at this, but it could also make sense even if not only the elderies die. There is a possibility it is a net positive for the economy.
Michigan has had hundreds of people in their 40's and 50's die (~13% of deaths):
https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98163_9817...
If you look here, you can see only 72% who die are above 64
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
Median I would guesstimate based on this data to be around 72 or so.
But the point is how many people are dying who weren't productive members of society and how many years these people would have lived if coronavirus didn't strike them.
For illustration purposes if it always killed those first who were closest to death anyway and death rate was 2% it would mean I guess 74 * 0,02 years lost for median person or 1.5 years.
This number will increase of course because true nature is more random.
And to be completely fair then if in US each year dies a bit less than 1% of people and not all of them at old age. So let's say it's 0.6% dying of old age, then 2% death rate might mean around 3 years lost for median person.
But as I said this are illustrative and non-precise calculations.
If I had to guess I would say it's reasonable to estimate that median person would lose 1 - 7 years of their life due to coronavirus.
I believe with some precautions (masks specifically and distancing and prohibit mass gathering for a bit) most places could open right now and the amount of additional hospitalizations and deaths would likely be economically inconsequential. People in general are going to be careful for a while.
Yes, opening would likely lead to more deaths, that is true, and perhaps we should not open for a bit for safety, but the key concept here is "economically inconsequential".
Rose said she was reopening her shop after closing a month ago, not because she wants to but because bills are piling up and she feels she has no choice."
I don't think people will be rushing out to get tattoos...
What we need is an open and honest discussion, where conflicting opinions are not ridiculed or shut down but vigorously debated. This would put a premium on clear logic substantiated by numbers and estimates on error bounds. And explanations that an average engineer can follow; not super-complicated things that require a supercomputer to run and a bunch of PhDs to interpret.
In the end it comes down to figuring out what additional risks we, as a society, are willing to accept to stave off specific erosions of personal freedoms and economic impacts. If we do not learn to make this choice consciously it will be made for us by whoever is loudest today (and swapped by whoever is loudest tomorrow).
For example, here's Nashville's phased-reopening plan: https://www.asafenashville.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ro... ... It's based around phased reopenings of businesses as specific periods of time elapse with an improvement in metrics.
I’ll trust public opinion with my next health decision, it’s always spot on.
People don’t want to get sick especially given the enormous costs of hospitalization in the US.
Table 2 is all a rational person should need to see to realize the quarantine is the work of fear-mongering by politicians and the media:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
(For those who need an explanation - over the last two months, the data compiled in this chart shows that for people under 54, they are vanishingly unlikely to die from COVID. It shows that there is no rational reason that people under 54 should be locked down.
The flu killed 5x more people under 24 in the last two months than COVID did)
I look at table 2 and see almost 30k people that died DESPITE a nationwide lockdown. Given what we know about the virus, that number would've hit 2M-4M had we not had the lockdown. What am I missing?
And a lockdown at this point doesn't save any lives, it only postpones the inevitable spread of the virus. It is not reasonable to stay in lockdown for a couple years until there is a vaccine, not for a virus that kills only 1 of 500 people.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
Im not saying COVID isn't a big deal. I'm saying the response was an overreaction. We need perspective on the actual severity. If the serological studies coming out are accurate, the total number of deaths is likely ~250k max. That's an alzheimers + suicides. National policy needs to be driven by statistics not emotion.
That's a BIG optimistic assumption to make. And every optimistic assumption that's been made relative to COVID has only fucked us over further. I'm not sure I'm ready to buy into that yet, cuz if it's off and the CFR is tipped the other way, we could be talking up to 30M deaths, not just 250k...
Consequently, this looks like a bunch of Republican governors trying to deny people unemployment benefits rather than a positive move to get back to normal.
Health officials have been saying to stay home all along. It's politicians that are saying it's ok not to.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather take advice from health officials instead of politicians.