A recent influential report posed the key Covid-19 issue today as: to mitigate or suppress? Should we focus on “flattening the curve” under the assumption that most everyone will get it soon, or adopt even stronger measures in an attempt to squash it, so most never get it.
You sure were right and I sure was wrong about whether the US government could successfully pull off a South Korea-style lockdown-and-containment (and, thus, about at least one factor relevant to whether lives-expensive alternatives such as variolation were worth working toward). Oops!
None of this requires the government. Whoever wants to quarantine newly infected people could also quarantine people who are not newly infected. The only difference is that there is a larger supply of uninfected people than known-infected people, from which to draw volunteers.
This seems exactly backwards to me. Squashing is slightly more difficult than flattening, but it takes much less time. After squashing there are years of contact tracing, which is difficult, but I think easier than anything else I have heard suggested.
If the government is not competent to quarantine sick people in hotels, then it is not competent to quarantine intentionally infected people. Maybe careful variolation is a good idea, but simply infecting people is risking just speeding up the epidemic. Complicated plans increase risks. If the government is too slow to move in the first place, it is too slow to implement complicated plans, too slow and incompetent to notice if the plan isn't working and readjust.
No, I don't feel lucky. I'm not optimistic that the government can implement the simplest plan, but I'm even more pessimistic about everything else.
Going way off-topic, re your recent interview on Burning the Cosmic Commons do you think that the evolutionary "Moore's law"/panspermia conjecture of Sharov and Gordon represents a credible alternative to the great filter thesis and to Drake equation-style models in general?
What are your thoughts on subsidized conditional prediction markets regarding COVID-19 growth in NYC? Which markets do you think would unearth the most valuable data? If I remember correctly you subsidized election markets on Intrade in '08. Very relevant experience.
Let's do the cost benefit analysis. All numbers could be a factor of 2 off:
If we "flatten" then a best likely case is 60% infected to achieve herd immunity, 50% of those infections being symptomatic, and a 0.7% death rate among symptomatic infections (the South Korean value), for a total death toll of 0.2% of the population. With most estimates of first-world VSL slightly less than 10 million USD, that is 20,000 USD per person, or several months' GDP.
A reasonable bad scenario would be 80% infected, 75% symptomatic, and the 3.4% death rate for symptomatic cases we saw in Wuhan (which we treat as a reasonable example of a healthcare system barely holding up under epidemic conditions) for a 2.0% death rate, or 200,000 USD per person, or several years' GDP.
The Imperial model tells us that the bad scenario is far more plausible. Deliberate exposure gets us closer to the good scenario, but by no means all the way there. To achieve South Korean death rates, everyone who needs a ventilator has to get one, which means spreading the deaths over years, not months.
So I put the cost of not squashing at 100,000 USD per person, or 1.5 years' GDP for the USA. Other first world countries have lower GDP, but they also have lower VSL, so I think 1-2 years GDP is a good estimate for a range of Western countries
So if squashing costs 9 months' GDP and has a 50% chance of success, it looks like a close call.
After reaching several thousand cases, squashing requires a full lockdown for 3 months, followed by border controls, contact tracing and less extreme social distancing for 18 months or so until a vaccine arrives. That looks like a cost of several months' GDP, but significantly less than 9.
I don't see either an inside or an outside view in the OP to suggest that the probability of success is <50%, just that it is well below 100%.
The Edelman report is very strange. Having been to China and Indonesia and talked to the locals, It seems bizarre that they are supposedly the two countries with most trust in their governments. When the locals talk openly (in private) about their government as a rampant corruption racket. Looking deeper, I see that Edelman is a PR firm that provides services such as crisis management, formation of front groups, astroturfing and the like. Think of then as the PR equivalent of toxic waste disposal, guns for hire.
As I mentioned I have been to China, know many people from there and who live or lived there, and have read extensively about the history over many years. Spare your PR yarns for others.
One very unfortunate aspect of this debacle is the cost that lack of trust brings. The CCP has earned the right to be distrusted, thus on the odd occasion when they tell the truth they will not be believed.
Is the outbreak in China under control? Who knows? There is still little or no traffic in Wuhan weeks after Xi's triumphal visit.
I have been investing for 35 years so I know this mandacity is not limited to health. No economic statistic from CCP controlled China can be believed. Verify everything.
Hundreds of currently infected New Yorkers will die soon due to mistakes of the past few weeks. But that situation is changing rapidly enough that any advice I give will be too late for their immediate crisis.
I don't remember your taking that position, but I'm always happy to see people updating on new evidence.
You sure were right and I sure was wrong about whether the US government could successfully pull off a South Korea-style lockdown-and-containment (and, thus, about at least one factor relevant to whether lives-expensive alternatives such as variolation were worth working toward). Oops!
None of this requires the government. Whoever wants to quarantine newly infected people could also quarantine people who are not newly infected. The only difference is that there is a larger supply of uninfected people than known-infected people, from which to draw volunteers.
Variolation doesn't have to managed or required by govt; govt just has to allow it to be done. And the idea is to isolate them immediately.
This seems exactly backwards to me. Squashing is slightly more difficult than flattening, but it takes much less time. After squashing there are years of contact tracing, which is difficult, but I think easier than anything else I have heard suggested.
If the government is not competent to quarantine sick people in hotels, then it is not competent to quarantine intentionally infected people. Maybe careful variolation is a good idea, but simply infecting people is risking just speeding up the epidemic. Complicated plans increase risks. If the government is too slow to move in the first place, it is too slow to implement complicated plans, too slow and incompetent to notice if the plan isn't working and readjust.
No, I don't feel lucky. I'm not optimistic that the government can implement the simplest plan, but I'm even more pessimistic about everything else.
I don't know about that conjecture.
Going way off-topic, re your recent interview on Burning the Cosmic Commons do you think that the evolutionary "Moore's law"/panspermia conjecture of Sharov and Gordon represents a credible alternative to the great filter thesis and to Drake equation-style models in general?
Looks like Disqus screwed up the link I provided, but I can't edit my original comment. I meant to link here: https://goodjudgment.io/cov...
What are your thoughts on subsidized conditional prediction markets regarding COVID-19 growth in NYC? Which markets do you think would unearth the most valuable data? If I remember correctly you subsidized election markets on Intrade in '08. Very relevant experience.
I think you overestimate the probability of success.
Let's do the cost benefit analysis. All numbers could be a factor of 2 off:
If we "flatten" then a best likely case is 60% infected to achieve herd immunity, 50% of those infections being symptomatic, and a 0.7% death rate among symptomatic infections (the South Korean value), for a total death toll of 0.2% of the population. With most estimates of first-world VSL slightly less than 10 million USD, that is 20,000 USD per person, or several months' GDP.
A reasonable bad scenario would be 80% infected, 75% symptomatic, and the 3.4% death rate for symptomatic cases we saw in Wuhan (which we treat as a reasonable example of a healthcare system barely holding up under epidemic conditions) for a 2.0% death rate, or 200,000 USD per person, or several years' GDP.
The Imperial model tells us that the bad scenario is far more plausible. Deliberate exposure gets us closer to the good scenario, but by no means all the way there. To achieve South Korean death rates, everyone who needs a ventilator has to get one, which means spreading the deaths over years, not months.
So I put the cost of not squashing at 100,000 USD per person, or 1.5 years' GDP for the USA. Other first world countries have lower GDP, but they also have lower VSL, so I think 1-2 years GDP is a good estimate for a range of Western countries
So if squashing costs 9 months' GDP and has a 50% chance of success, it looks like a close call.
After reaching several thousand cases, squashing requires a full lockdown for 3 months, followed by border controls, contact tracing and less extreme social distancing for 18 months or so until a vaccine arrives. That looks like a cost of several months' GDP, but significantly less than 9.
I don't see either an inside or an outside view in the OP to suggest that the probability of success is <50%, just that it is well below 100%.
Looking through your posts on Disqus I have formed the hypothesis that you are a mouthpiece for the CCP.
As for your graph above I search based on your oh-so-vague citations and find the opposite for Forbes.
https://www.forbes.com/site...
The Edelman report is very strange. Having been to China and Indonesia and talked to the locals, It seems bizarre that they are supposedly the two countries with most trust in their governments. When the locals talk openly (in private) about their government as a rampant corruption racket. Looking deeper, I see that Edelman is a PR firm that provides services such as crisis management, formation of front groups, astroturfing and the like. Think of then as the PR equivalent of toxic waste disposal, guns for hire.
As I mentioned I have been to China, know many people from there and who live or lived there, and have read extensively about the history over many years. Spare your PR yarns for others.
The CCP has earned the right to be distrusted, thus on the odd occasion when they tell the truth they will not be believed?
Tim, I have news for you. The CCP is the most trusted government on earth. By far.https://i.imgur.com/tCEAFz5...
I expect the virus evidence will be something like 2 orders of magnitude more informative than war evidence has been.
Well, such is the CCP narrative, anyway.
One very unfortunate aspect of this debacle is the cost that lack of trust brings. The CCP has earned the right to be distrusted, thus on the odd occasion when they tell the truth they will not be believed.
Is the outbreak in China under control? Who knows? There is still little or no traffic in Wuhan weeks after Xi's triumphal visit.
I have been investing for 35 years so I know this mandacity is not limited to health. No economic statistic from CCP controlled China can be believed. Verify everything.
Hundreds of currently infected New Yorkers will die soon due to mistakes of the past few weeks. But that situation is changing rapidly enough that any advice I give will be too late for their immediate crisis.