How the Lockdown Ends

In his book Hitch -22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens describes Salman Rushdie's experience living under a fatwa against him. Rushdie had to live in hiding, though he eventually re-emerged.

Salman began making ventures in travel, testing the walls of the prison that he had to cart, almost tortoise-like, around with him. Vaclav Havel agreed to receive him in Prague. President Mary Robinson of Ireland had him to Dublin. He continued pushing at the bars and restrictions, refusing to allow himself to be immured or obliterated. 

This describes a man who initially hides himself away from a very real threat, but who eventually grows weary of this life and tests the boundaries. Each venture further emboldens him, and he eventually emerges again as a public figure. 

I suspect something like this will happen with the coronavirus lockdown. There won't be an official "all-clear", just as there was no official end to the fatwa against Rushdie. People will simply tire of it. They will gradually become less observant of safety protocols. The "scolds" will be in the minority and they'll know it, so moral suasion will no longer be an effective way of getting compliance. More and more businesses will open, despite not having the official go-ahead from their state government. ("So sue me. See how that worked out in Ohio.") I think sheer laziness and inertia will eventually steer us back to normal. At-risk individuals will still wisely maintain a safe distance, but the majority of the population will gradually lose their fear of the virus after the novelty has worn off. 

All bets are off here if the virus really comes roaring back. If easing the lockdowns leads to a huge spike in active cases or deaths, I think people really will re-learn their fear and return to their sanctuaries. The coming weeks will tell, but so far this doesn't seem to be happening. 

Nobody will eat crow. Everybody will think that they were "right all along." Coronavirus "minimizers" will compare the projected deaths to the realized total and say, "See, this was just a bad flu season. No big deal." Coronavirus "alarmists" will say, "It would have been much worse if not for the lockdown." Neither is being serious about counterfactual thinking. The minimizers aren't acknowledging that the virus would probably have spread farther without any kind of lockdown, and the alarmists aren't acknowledging that individuals and businesses would have taken precautions regardless of what their state governments told them to do. Anyway, most people don't have well-defined opinions. Alarmists who were insisting that we absolutely needed the lockdown won't be embarrassed if we ease lockdowns and nothing terrible happens. They'll reason something like, "I always thought we should trust the experts to decide when it's time to reopen. We began a gradual reopening at the appropriate time, with politicians following expert advice about the timing." (Reopening due to judicial decisions, like in Ohio and Wisconsin, are pseudo-random policy changes that mess with the "just following expert judgment" story, but that point will be easily dismissed.)  Not having made any definite prediction, nobody will feel compelled to reevaluate their worldview. We will ease into a post-lockdown world and people will simply ease into their new talking points, as if acclimating to a slightly too-warm bath. People mostly sleep-walk into their opinions. Few will stand athwart history yelling "Stop!" They will mostly continue to follow Jonathan Haidt's "elephant rider" model, whereby the elephant goes wherever it wants to go and the rider, while managing to steer the beast very slightly, convinces himself that "This is what I wanted him to do." This is an almost perfect analogy for how people change their minds in practice.

As much as I prefer the strategy of simply becoming inured to the risk, I do wish there was more introspection about where we went wrong (oh, there is plenty of extrospection!). But the combination of shallow opinion-holding, exhaustion, and sheer inertia will lead us more quickly to a post-lockdown world. Even though nobody will have learned anything about anything. 

I am noticing examples of this in my personal life. I have a healthcare worker in my home. For a while she was showering each day after returning from work. That has stopped, and without any commentary or without anyone batting an eye. (She of course follows other safety protocols, like wearing a mask and gloves at work and changing out of work clothes. This is just one extra above-and-beyond level of hygiene that's being discarded.) My in-laws stayed home for two months without venturing out for anything. My wife brought them groceries, but physically kept her distance. Then three weeks ago, we all met up for a family gathering. It included my wife and kids, my wife's parents, her brother, and her aunt and uncle. It was a foregone conclusion that they would not "social distance" from their adorable grandchildren. There was lots of hugging. We met up again two weeks later, and we were even more lax about "distancing" protocols. On the first meetup, we were very careful about who touched which utensils to serve themselves various dishes. On the second, we were all reaching into open bags of chips and serving ourselves dip from the same spoon. (Everyone was careful to wash their hands, I should add.) There was no discussion of relaxing safety protocols, no meeting where we analysed the virus' prevalence in our community and thus downgraded our assessment of the risk level. It just kind of happened. And I suspect my personal experience isn't unusual. None of this is to say "This is how it should be." This is more of an observation and prediction than a prescription. 

Returning to the passage above. Rushdie could have been gunned down the second he gained enough confidence to step out into the light. Under that counterfactual the reference would take on a very different meaning. Sometimes a fatalistically acclimating to a risk is the wrong strategy after all.  

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Back to "nobody will have learned anything about anything" for a moment. I feel like I've been doing an adequate job of updating as new information came in. Someone had asked me my opinion of the coronavirus in early March. My now slightly embarrassing answer was: 

Just a vague sense of “I've heard all this before.”

Which was a reference to scare-stories about the "avian flu" and "swine flu." And I shared this link of an early and too-optimistic take by Ron Bailey. I'm not too embarrassed. I always entertained the possibility that this could be really bad (and still do), though it's possible I rated the probability too low. It's clearly turning out to be milder than the most dire predictions. 

For Whom Are We Preserving the Commons?

The "tragedy of the commons" is a classic collective action problem. Really, it's a short-hand term for all collective action problems. A "commons" or common-pool resource is something that is collectively owned, like a wide open range for grazing sheep or cattle. Because there is no single owner, the resource will tend to be overused. Suppose a single farmer owned the range and all the cattle grazing on it. That farmer would not overgraze. He would limit the cattle he owned to a number that the grazing land could sustain. Too many and the grass doesn't grow back fast enough and his herd begins to starve. If he is instead letting his herd graze on a communal property owned by many cattle farmers, he will tend to overgraze. "If I add a few more head of cattle" he says, "I get the benefit, but the cost is borne by many other people." Every individual farmer hits on the same solution, where the individually rational choice is irrational from the point of view of the whole group. Either the land gets overgrazed to the point where it only supports a small number of cattle (compared to the optimum), or the farmers come to some kind of agreement and enforcement mechanism to prevent overgrazing*.

There are other examples of this. The air is a commons into which we dump pollution; it can be over-polluted. The ocean is a commons from which we extract fish; it can be over-fished. As I write this, person-to-person contact is a kind of commons. Doing too much of it tends to spread infectious disease. The individually rational choice might be to socialize with abandon. But we'd all like everyone else to socialize at least a bit less than they normally would. You might be an asymptomatic spreader of covid-19, so every contact you have with other people is a tiny externality (a cost imposed on other people). If you are actively infectious, you might be tempted to take a trip to the store rather than self-quarantine. After all, you're already sick. You incur no cost by going out, assuming you're physically well enough to manage an outing. If you don't care about the costs imposed on others, your personal cost-benefit computation might lead you to spread the disease, even though the social cost-benefit analysis would have you stay at home. That's the logic stated in simple terms, anyway. And that's the basic rationale for a state-imposed "lock-down."

But wait a minute. Say everyone's basically staying at home. Can I go out? Why have all these empty streets if nobody can travel them? Why not go to the totally empty store, where the chance of contracting covid-19 is now negligible? It's like saying, "We're overgrazing the land, so everybody has to stop grazing completely." Once the grass grows back, you might as well let someone graze. A more useful way of thinking about this is that there is an optimal level of usage for any commons. There is an optimum amount of lock-down, where people are allowed to do activities provided there is enough room to avoid other people. I'm thinking specifically of the guy who was arrested for surfing. Now, maybe the police had to set an example in this case. If one person gets to flout the law, then others will start to follow. But it would have made more sense to keep the beaches open so long as they didn't get too crowded. (Or to not shut them down at all. You can maintain your distance on a beach, for crying out loud.) Likewise, stores can be opened with the condition that they follow reasonable protocols. Say you allow in one patron at a time, the risk to other patrons is minimal. (The CDC has recently downgraded its estimate of the risk of transmission on surfaces. Direct person-to-person contact seems to be the dominant means of spreading.)

My great frustration with the government response to covid-19 is that it doesn't seem to have any clear goal or any end-game in mind. State governments aren't doing the basic cost-benefit analysis that they needs to be doing. (If they are doing this behind closed doors, they're not showing their work.) Keyboard warriors and Facebook-scolds are piling on in obnoxious ways. "Why can't we go out, since we're at such low risk of being harmed by the virus?" young people quite reasonably ask. They usually get some version of this totally inadequate answer: "Because if you go out, you could get sick and infect someone else." That is technically true, but completely useless as a framework for crafting policy. That answer has no sense of numeracy or magnitudes or relative costs. It shows no comprehension of what people actually want or how much they're willing to pay to get it. Maybe terms like "cost-benefit analysis" and "optimum rate of viral spreading" sound bloodless, like we're tolerating preventable deaths based on the outcome of a spreadsheet calculation. But what's truly inhuman is declining to inform policy with this kind of consideration. You can't avoid placing a dollar value on a human life, not if you're actually serious about treating people with the respect they deserve.

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*In practice, these kinds of coordination problems get solved. See Elinor Ostrom's excellent book Governing the Commons. It has many examples of these kinds of common-pool resource problems getting solved. It turns out that people are capable of talking to each other. They don't just suffer in silence, they come up with mutually agreeable rules that fix the problem. We also all observe basic norms of fairness. Even if we are sociopaths who don't personally get the "warm fuzzies" when we think about fairness, the fair solution is a kind of focal point that can solve the coordination problem. ("Equal sharing" of a commons is a more obvious solution than "Jimmy gets first dibs on everything," even though everyone would like to impose the second rule and be Jimmy. It might also be the solution that generates optimal enforcement, with users of the commons reporting cheaters and adjudicating disputes because they all have buy-in.) Ostrom slays some left-wing tropes by showing that we don't need government to solve all externality problems. It's also fair to say she slays some right-wing tropes by showing "privatize everything" isn't always the best option. Some communal properties are best left communal, but the best solution to some particular problem might come from the individuals participating, not far-off bureaucrats or capitalist "owners".

Quarantine Policy and the Veil of Ignorance

Young person: "I want to live my life! Open the economy, let me work, let me socialize as I please. I'm young enough that the risk to me is negligible. It's comparable to the other risks that are just part of normal life."

Scold: "You're killing grandma!"

People are not thinking very clearly about this problem. There is a population that is relatively immune to the virus. The young and healthy have a very low risk of death or serious complications. Older people and people with risk factors are many times more likely to die. What's good for one group's interests is bad for the other group's interests. But society as a whole can only really have one policy with respect to quarantining the young and healthy.

It turns out there is a useful tool for thinking about this kind of problem. Obviously we shouldn't be picking whatever policy happens to favor ourselves, just because I'm me and I like things that benefit me. We need to pick the policy that's optimal from the point of view of society as a whole. You should answer the question about quarantining young people as if you didn't know whether you were young or old. You should try to disregard any knowledge of who you actually are. Imagine a cosmic roll of the dice will randomly reassign your identity after the policy decision has been made. This is a powerful tool to discipline your thinking. You can use it to actively root out any self-serving bias, whereby you back-fit an argument to the conclusion that suits you.  This is the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

I presented this as if it's a conflict between young people who want to be free, damn the consequences, and old people who are worried that crowds of mingling young people might spread the disease to them. But actually people are pretty altruistic. Young people are very much worried about their grandparents. I have personally heard many young and healthy people express concern for their elderly relatives. Some of them described to me their personal efforts to avoid contact with them, and some voice these concerns in defense of government imposed lock-downs. On the other side, I have heard older people saying essentially, "We don't want this from you, and we'd never ask it of you." Some of them would not have their children or grandchildren give up their livelihoods.

The veil of ignorance should lead you to think about what it is you actually want at various stages of your life. On the one hand, we do have our selfish wants and desires. I want to socialize. I want to attend public events and eat at restaurants and take my small children to filthy indoor play-places, which are surely hotbeds of transmissible pathogens. But we also want things for our loved ones. I certainly don't want my parents to get this virus. That's a selfish desire, too. But we can take that a step further and think about what we will want at later stages of our lives. I hope my kids grow up to be successful adults. That's a selfish desire, not an altruistic one. Everyone wants that for their own children, and they want it like they want a satisfying meal, not in the sense that they want to solve world hunger. They don't think of resources spent in pursuit of their children's well-being as charity. It's consumption. Money spent on your child's tuition is money spent trying to get something that you want. Most of us don't wouldn't selfishly sabotage our adult children's careers in return for trivial benefits to ourselves. The health benefits would have to be quite large before a typical parent would say, "Yes, I'll take that from the younger generation." Young people should be contemplating not just how much they want their older relatives to survive the pandemic, but what they would want for their adult children at a later stage of their life.

Imagine your elderly self sitting at the kitchen table, contemplating your adult children and perhaps young grandchildren losing their social lives and perhaps being unable to work (as many adults aren't). Another hundred-year pandemic has hit. There is some benefit to you of locking down the young, in that there are fewer people milling about and spreading the virus. Even though your relatives may be making heroic efforts to avoid getting you sick, more sick young people means a greater chance of any given elderly person getting sick. That's true because we can't create perfect separation between vulnerable and low-risk populations. But the benefit to you comes with a cost, and it's one you might not be willing to pay as a parent and grandparent. If this hypothetical makes you feel guilty, you should probably reassess the wisdom of locking down young people. "I don't want my elderly relatives to get sick" isn't much of an answer here. They might want something different for you, if it were up to them. You should be able to viscerally understand this with a little bit of introspection.

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This whole post is side-stepping the possibility that it might be better for the elderly if the young simply get the pandemic "over with" from their point of view. I think there is some wisdom to this idea. I actually think these past two and a half months have been an enormous wasted opportunity. We could have been allowing children to go to school. They have a negligible rate of fatalities or serious complications. Immune-compromised children or children who live with elderly or sick parents could remain home if they don't feel safe, and we wouldn't demand that elderly teachers or support staff mix with them. We'd have had more covid outbreaks by now, but a large fraction of the population would come out of it with immunity. We wouldn't necessarily have "herd immunity", but we'd have these epidemiological fire-breaks interspersed through the population. Suppose the virus flares up again with things as they are now. If the virus gets into a school, a lot of people will get it, probably long before anyone realizes there's a problem if there is asymptomatic spread. One might then reasonably ask, "Why were schools shut down for so long, just for it to happen again? What was accomplished other than moving the inevitable forward in time?"

Robin Hanson has run some simulations that suggest exposing the young is a good idea. I don't know enough to certify that he's right, I just wanted to point to a more rigorous version of the "expose the young" argument. If quarantining the young is counter-productive from the point of view of the elderly, then obviously that changes the cost-benefit considerations I try to outline above. 

Evidence From a Massive Experiment With Private Socialism

Here is a great interview on Econtalk from a couple of years ago. Ran Abramitzky discusses his book, titled The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World. The interview starts with him giving a discussion of the kibbutzim:

So today there are like 120,000 people living in 268 kibbutzim, and they come from about two and a half percentage of the Jewish population of Israel. They vary in size from, say, like 100 to slightly over 1000. The average size of kibbutz is 440 members--which is like about 150 families or so.

I think this is an excellent data point. It places an upper-bound on how successful socialism can actually be. In a society where joining a commune is not frowned upon or stigmatized, only about 2.5% of the Jewish population actually want to be involved. And the sizes of the kibbutzim are revealing. None of them scaled up to thousands or millions of people. Why not, if this is truly the optimal way to organize a society? Shouldn't people be clamoring to join? Should a worker's paradise, which doesn't have to pay the parasitic management salaries, be able to out-compete private firms? This is a space in which socialism was given a chance to flourish, and instead it just fizzles. People who insist it will work if we just implement it a the scale of hundreds of millions of people are just being delusional. They are not listening to the lessons of history.

I don't have the page numbers on hand, but Stephen Pinker's excellent book The Blank Slate has a long discussion of the kibbutzim breaking down or changing their policies to be less collectivist. It happens in pretty much exactly in the ways that a critic of socialism would predict. People want to own their own property and raise their own children. People overuse communal resources. If you must pay your own water bill or pay for meals for your guests, you will show more restraint in your consumption. I think these were noble experiments, and it's admirable that they were done with willing volunteers. But it's hard to escape the fact that it didn't work out as planned. It's just as hard to deny the implications of this history.

We don't actually need the example of the kibbutzim to learn this lesson. One could just observe that these kinds of socialist societies don't spring up in the real world and don't dominate the other models for organizing society. They don't dominate modern corporations in terms of production and distribution, and they aren't more attractive than private homes for raising families or private clubs or churches for socializing. Still, it's useful to have a real-world example to point to, particularly if you're trying to convince someone who lacks the imagination for indulging hypotheticals and counterfactuals. Confronted with a working model "in the wild" that fails to gain much traction should be a warning sign for proponents of socialism. Expanding on a famous movie quote: "If you build it, they will come...unless it's just a terrible idea. Then nobody will come. Sorry for wasting everyone's time."

Not Real Gremlins

Pro: I think we should start feeding our gremlins after midnight!

Against: What!? That goes horribly wrong every time it’s tried. Don’t you remember Stripe? Mohawk?

Pro: (scoffs) Those were not real gremlins. It’s obvious that they were bad from the start.

Against: Okay, but people just like you were cheering the experiment while it was being run. It only morphed into a “mistake” and “not real gremlins” after the fact.

Pro: You’re such a philistine. You just don’t understand that those were all poor implementations of my grand vision.

Against: Why do you think it will go so well this time?

Pro: We’ve learned from history. Of course, those past experiments with feeding gremlins after midnight were done under non-ideal circumstances.

Against: But *every* time. Don’t you think it might be a constitutional feature of gremlins that feeding them after midnight turns them into little green bastards?

Pro: Northern Europeans have had tremendous success feeding gremlins after midnight.

Against: No, they actually *don’t* feed their gremlins after midnight. That's a common misconception. They took a few baby-steps toward later feedings, and they backed off when the experience turned sour. I mean, it wasn't full-on green bastardry, but a lot of them still became spoiled, foul tempered little shitheads. *Everyone agreed* it was a mistake, even the initial proponents.  

Pro: Whatever. Okay, so they *didn’t* implement my preferred gremlin-feeding policy. So it’s not a counter-example either. If we fully implement it, it will work. Baby-steps toward the pure policy don’t work. The opt-outs spoil it for everyone else.

Against: Isn’t that a little suspicious? It doesn’t work unless *everyone* is compelled to do it? Incremental steps toward it are always a failure, but going at it full throttle will be this miraculous success the world has never seen?

Pro: You bore me. (Picks up a pet carrier with little green clawed fingers sticking out.) Excuse me, little Hugo here needs a bath.

Against: No, dammit!

Restating History: Flu Deaths

Here is an interesting piece in Scientific American titled Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges. It argues that historical numbers for flu deaths have been overstated. The CDC takes in raw numbers of confirmed flu cases and deaths. Some people are actually tested for the flu virus when they get sick, and presumably the positive tests counts are somehow tabulated. The CDC does some complicated calculation to figure out what the true incidence of the flu was for each season. Obviously not all cases of flu will come to the attention of medical personnel, so any attempt to literally "count cases" is bound to be an under-count. (I have several recent posts that mention this idea.) They do something similar with flu deaths. Not every death that was caused by the flu will get an identical death certificate. Some may explicitly mention flu, others might not, or they might list it but not as part of the official sequence in the cause of death. (Some of the mechanics of filling out a death certificate are described in this post.)

The Scientific American piece suggests that the CDC is arbitrarily inflating previous flu deaths. The author is a physician who suggests that the numbers published by the CDC don't match his clinical experience. He consults with some colleagues and suggests he's not alone:

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.
 Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?
 I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

They give a brief overview of the CDC's methodology:

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.
 There is some logic behind the CDC’s methods. There are, of course, some flu deaths that are missed, because not everyone who contracts the flu gets a flu test. But there are little data to support the CDC’s assumption that the number of people who die of flu each year is on average six times greater than the number of flu deaths that are actually confirmed. In fact, in the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths.

It is hard for me to evaluate the Scientific American piece in isolation. I can't suppress the feeling that it might be a piece of motivated reasoning brought on by the events of the day. I'm not even saying his claims are wrong. They could very well be true. But it's clear that he's annoyed about the comparison of the coronavirus to the flu. At some level, he's motivated by a desire to see this comparison go away. (Read the piece; he basically says as much.) What's suspicious to me is that he doesn't say "I see flu deaths only about 1/6th as often as the CDC suggests I should." He says he almost never sees them. Recall that he sees gunshot, auto accident, and drug poisoning deaths "all the time." Shouldn't he also notice something that's only 1/6th as common, assuming 6x is the true over-statement factor? (Or perhaps he's suggesting that some of the "confirmed flu deaths" aren't really flu deaths, so the true total is even lower than the "confirmed cases"? It's hard for me to read it that way, though.)

To me, this is similar to the climate debates. It used to be the accepted wisdom that there was a "Mideaval warm period", which allowed the Norse to colonize Greenland and grow crops and raise cattle. That became an annoyance for people who wanted to argue that what's happening to the climate now is historically unprecedented, so the new accepted wisdom is that this warm period either didn't happen or was very localized. This is another claim that might not even be wrong, but it looks suspiciously like the motivated reasoning you'd undertake if you wanted to rob someone of one of their arguments. I think we should be wary of revising history to fit it in with the fashionable narrative of the day.

Here is some data that I pulled from this CDC website, first the number of confirmed flu deaths by year:

In terms of ordering the flu seasons, it's roughly consistent with this page showing estimated flu deaths in various years. (Note that I have re-stated the week. Confusingly, the CDC labels the weeks 1-52, with 1 meaning the beginning of January and 52 meaning the end of December. But then they label weeks 40-52 and 1-39 of the next year as a single flu season. I've re-stated this so that "week 1" means week 1 of that flu season, the beginning of October, rather than the beginning of a calendar year. As I write this at the beginning of May, we're at right around week 29 or 30 of the flu season.)

That was flu deaths. Let's also look at death totals:

It really does look like something was killing lots of people right in the middle of the 2017-2018 flu season. Note that the peaks on the two charts line up pretty well. So maybe something else was killing people in that season and these were being miscoded as flu deaths? To me, the most likely explanation is that the CDC's methodology is basically right. I don't know how exactly to do an "excess deaths" calculation, but crudely taking the mean count of total deaths in weeks 11-31 of the flu season (when it's most severe) and subtracting it from each year's total, 2017-2018 looks like an especially intense year.

Note that total deaths are starting to spike for this year, as reflected in the pink line. Don't read too much into the latest year's numbers, at least not for recent weeks. There appears to be some development in these numbers. Pulling the data on two different dates resulted in different death totals for the most recent weeks, so the CDC is putting these numbers out before they are fully baked. The apparent fall from week 28 to 29 is almost certainly not real. I will be watching that trend in coming weeks to see what the "excess deaths due to coronavirus" story looks like. I know that regionally some places are showing excess deaths, presumably due to the coronavirus. I didn't want to censor this data from the chart, knowing that it would be of interest. So instead I'm showing it with this caveat.

If people find the Scientific American piece compelling, I want them to acknowledge some cognitive dissonance. There are people who angrily insist that "this isn't like the flu" at any hint of a comparison. These tend to be the same people who insist that we should trust "the experts" and "The Science ™". Here we have a sort of expert, a physician, saying that these other experts, epidemiologists and statisticians at the CDC, are wrong. It strikes me that the people who will want to use this article to shut up those stupid flu comparisons are in other contexts insisting that we place our trust in experts. I want to see the contradiction acknowledged. 
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I found this concerning:

The CDC should immediately change how it reports flu deaths. While in the past it was justifiable to err on the side of substantially overestimating flu deaths, in order to encourage vaccination and good hygiene, at this point the CDC’s reporting about flu deaths is dangerously misleading the public and even public officials about the comparison between these two viruses. If we incorrectly conclude that COVID-19 is “just another flu,” we may retreat from strategies that appear to be working in minimizing the speed of spread of the virus.

Emphasis mine. I hate to say this, but it makes me trust the author even less. He is suggesting that it's justifiable to tell the noble lie, to needlessly exaggerate a problem to prompt some kind of public response. (Does this even work? My impression is that nobody really cared about 2017-2018 being an especially bad flu year. I didn't even know about it, and presumably I'm not the only one who missed it.) It almost sounds like he'd be fine with the exaggerated estimates (if they are that) persisting if it weren't for this new virus. I think this is totally wrong. The noble lie ultimately gets sniffed out, and the public health community loses esteem for it. That is what's truly dangerous, especially if they lose credibility at the exact moment we need to hear them. It's also wrong for public health officials to decide what they think we should want and try to give us that. Their job should be to give us raw information and analysis and let individuals and policymakers decide what risks and trade-offs they want to accept.

In my opinion, being inured to the flu is the right response, even if the CDC's high estimates are correct. We just can't be shutting down our society every time there is a bad flu year. If the coronavirus proves to be persistent enough, that might be the strategy we have to take with it, too. There have been particularly devastating flu years (1957 and I believe 1968-69), where we might have saved some lives with excessive sheltering. But we bounced back quickly and mostly forgot about it. Without diligent public health record-keeping, we wouldn't even remember these years.

Contra Contra "Welcome to Socialism"

This post has been making the rounds, apparently. I've seen a few people share it on Facebook, so I thought I'd respond.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you need to know how silly you look if you post some variation of, "Welcome to Socialism..."

The first sentence, just to set the tone.

You are not seeing Socialism. What you are seeing is one of the wealthiest, geographically advantaged, productive capitalist societies in the world flounder and fail at its most basic test. Taking care of its people. 

This crisis is not about the virus. 

This crisis is about the massive failure of our, "Booming economy," to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates. 

The first paragraph in this block is kind of confusing. I don't know if he's saying this rich, capitalist society is failing by the standards and goals of self-described capitalists, or if he's saying it's failing according to a goal assigned to us by some other ideology. It would be a more interesting claim if we were failing by our own standards and values, but it's far less interesting to say that we fail according to some test or by some standard set by someone else. I'm not sure what "taking care of its people" means. A well-versed libertarian would probably argue that free market societies are all-round richer (they are), so the poor are much better off and have more resources to take care of themselves. There is less of a central "do-er" in a free market society, in which the state is not charged with solving all social problems. But that describes a fictional capitalist society. The "capitalist" society we live in actually has enormous amounts of welfare spending and income transfers and regulation of markets. If governments that do a lot of income transfers make poor choices and fail to "take care of their people," that's a mark against socialism, not capitalism.

The third paragraph in this block is worse. If he is blaming "capitalism" for the shortages in stores and surpluses of crops, then he is confused about the causes of these problems. Shortages are caused by price controls. Anti-gouging laws prevent the prices of scarce commodities from rising, which makes it unlikely that anyone will ramp up production to meet the higher demand. Those higher prices, if stores were allowed to charge them, would discourage hoarding. This combination of encouraging production and discouraging hoarding would fill those empty shelves in short order. Market critics need to acknowledge the bad government policies that are getting in the way. It's more than just anti-gouging laws. The government is in many cases actively getting in the way. Foolish regulations on food packaging have prevented a reallocation of the food supply from restaurants to grocery stores. Other regulations have made it difficult for distilleries to produce hand sanitizer. Businesses want to fill market demand and reallocate capital to the highest valued use. Socialists need to acknowledge that government is getting in the way. In a trivial sense "this isn't socialism", because the government doesn't actively own the means of production. But it's damn close to socialism when the government tightly dictates the terms under which commerce can happen.

This crisis is about corporatized healthcare systems being unable and ill equipped to provide basic healthcare, at the same time they post record profits. It is about crisis response depending on antiquated systems nobody remembers how to operate.

This is particularly clueless. Our healthcare system is incredibly socialized. There are not market prices, because almost nobody pays out of pocket for anything. Medicare effectively sets prices by determining reimbursement rates, which private insurers are often compelled to follow. (What kind of system is it when the government sets prices?) When the bad features of our system are removed and people pay out of pocket, the prices come down dramatically and quality and responsiveness to patients' needs improve. Our healthcare system has been wrecked by inadequate reliance on markets, not an excess of them. Laws mandate that employers to "provide" health insurance, while other laws mandate that insurers "pay for" various treatments. (Scare-quotes here because ultimately the employee/insurance customer pays for everything. That is a blindingly obvious bit of econ-101 level reasoning. But sometimes proponents of these mandates pretend they are achieving some kind of transfer from "capitalist" employers to workers, or from insurers to customers. We need clearer thinking and language when we discuss the wisdom of these mandates.) Again, he is simply not acknowledging that government is in the way. Recall that the CDC initially put out a defective test. A frustrated epidemiologist believed the virus was present in her community, but could not secure permission from the CDC and FDA for her test. She tested anyway and was given the finger-wag by the FDA for using an "unapproved" test.

Note also that face masks and other ppe are highly regulated. There were people who wanted to ramp up production but couldn't because they could not secure the government's permission. There are import restrictions on ppe, which the FDA mercifully but belatedly lifted. This is a system in which you must secure permission from the government to produce something. That's not government ownership of the means of production, but it is government control. The most effective part of the government's response to this crisis has been to remove these various barriers and let private firms operate freely. (And, once again, anti price-gouging laws are hurting us. It's as true for ppe as it is for toilet paper and hand sanitizer.)

It's notable that he calls it our "corporatized healthcare system" rather than "our free-market healthcare system". It certainly isn't the latter. "Corporatized" implies some degree of free markets and private ownership, but it leaves the door open for lots of government intervention: subsidies, regulation, mandates, barriers to entry, cronyism, baptist-and-bootlegger style rent-seeking. Is the author aware of certificate of need laws, which block hospital systems from expanding capacity or purchasing new equipment? CON laws basically give large hospitals veto power over their competitors' operations. I suppose it's not wrong to call this a "corporatized" system, but it seems like that word was carefully chosen to lay blame on markets and punt on conceding any blame for our massive system of government interventions.

I think I actually agree with the spirit of this next part, with a few obvious exceptions:

But most of all, this crisis is a direct result of the politicization of every aspect of our society for the benefit of a privileged few. The vilification of education, science, media, natural rights, rural lifestyles, urban lifestyles, charity, compassion, and virtually everything else for brief political gain has gutted our society.

What you are seeing is a quarter century of technological brilliance being reduced to a narcissistic popularity contest. You're seeing the folly of basing the health and welfare of an entire society on personal greed. You're seeing all the necessary tools, for us to shrug off this crisis, go unused while people argue over who should get the credit and profit. Even worse, you're seeing vital help withheld because recipients might not, "deserve it..."

I'll join him in decrying the "politicization of every aspect of our society" and the "narcissistic popularity contest". I don't know about the "vilification of education". As Bryan Caplan points out in The Case Against Education, education is quite popular, and per-pupil spending has gone up continuously, despite no sign of improving outcomes. Other than that, the author does put his finger on a truly obnoxious feature of our society: people join "left tribe" and "right tribe" and everything becomes politicized along this axis. For some reason, things that should not correlate with your politics do. People predictably align with the "correct" opinion and orient themselves against the opposite tribe. I could stand to see less of that.

In a sense he's correct that "this isn't socialism". But if I were going to write a "this isn't socialism" piece, I'd point out all the ways that we've ditched socialism because it was hurting us, many examples of which are given above. I'd point out that altruistic billionaires are on top of this while government is asleep at the wheel. I'd point out that private businesses acted appropriately before the government mandated shut-downs, such as the NBA cancelling its season and companies sending their employees to work from home when possible. Sure, some features of our system are obviously socialist. Like Trump ordering meat producers back to work. Or passing a 2 trillion dollar spending bill and allowing the government to literally allocate capital in the economy. Sure, obviously that's socialism. It's no less socialist because the government, once empowered, makes poor decisions and has the wrong priorities. Some socialists would like to tautalogically define "socialism" as "good, well-functioning socialism", but we're far too sophisticated to fall for that trick.

It's probably not very productive to label things "socialist" and "capitalist", and then claim that certain bad outcomes impugn one ideology or another. When critics use the word "capitalism", they usually mean some degree of free markets with a lot of cronyism, with government putting its thumb (or fist) on the scale to benefit big businesses. When proponents of free markets discuss capitalism, they will often criticize the same business-favoring policies that socialists don't like. It devolves into a pointless discussion about what words mean. Same with socialism. It doesn't have a consistent definition. Maybe some people are still using the original meaning of "government ownership of the means of production," and maybe some people (who don't know that the 20th century happened) still think that's a good idea. Some proponents use the term to loosely mean "lots of government intervention in the economy and lots of income redistribution". Some opponents of socialism use the term to mean "any government intervention in the market", and many moderate leftists bristle at the term.

A more fruitful approach would be to discuss the merits of any particular government program. I don't care if it's "socialism" or "capitalism" when our government hands out checks to incumbent businesses. I think it's a terrible idea, but it doesn't particularly matter what you call it. We have a massive welfare state that primarily redistributes from young to old, not from rich to poor. I don't care if we call that "socialism" or something else. But I will certainly make the point that this is likely to happen when government has a mandate to "help the poor." Give government control over society's resources, and it will predictably distribute it to politically powerful groups and reliable voting blocks (the elderly). It's what we're likely to get when someone tries to implement socialism in the real world, with all it's political constraints fully in play.
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Here is the full text of the original post:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you need to know how silly you look if you post some variation of, "Welcome to Socialism..."

You are not seeing Socialism. What you are seeing is one of the wealthiest, geographically advantaged, productive capitalist societies in the world flounder and fail at its most basic test. Taking care of its people.

This crisis is not about the virus.

This crisis is about the massive failure of our, "Booming economy," to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates.

This crisis is about corporatized healthcare systems being unable and ill equipped to provide basic healthcare, at the same time they post record profits. It is about crisis response depending on antiquated systems nobody remembers how to operate.

But most of all, this crisis is a direct result of the politicization of every aspect of our society for the benefit of a privileged few. The vilification of education, science, media, natural rights, rural lifestyles, urban lifestyles, charity, compassion, and virtually everything else for brief political gain has gutted our society.

What you are seeing is a quarter century of technological brilliance being reduced to a narcissistic popularity contest. You're seeing the folly of basing the health and welfare of an entire society on personal greed. You're seeing all the necessary tools, for us to shrug off this crisis, go unused while people argue over who should get the credit and profit. Even worse, you're seeing vital help withheld because recipients might not, "deserve it..."

You're seeing a lot of things nobody thought they'd ever see, but you're not seeing Socialism...

"Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves."

-- Horace Mann

Insidious Reproduction Strategy of a Virus

I've been listening to the Dark Horse podcast with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. They are two married biologists who have a lot of interesting things to say about COVID-19. If you're looking for a good source of information and vetting of various media stories by people knowledgeable about the science, this is it.

I wanted to discuss one episode in which Heather suggests she may have gotten COVID-19. She recalls being very sick and having a litany of symptoms, some of which were consistent with the new virus. But the illness was in early February, before anyone was even talking about the virus being present in the US. She didn't even think that it might have been COVID-19 until much later. We recently learned that the virus was probably in the U.S. much earlier than the first reported cases some time in late February or early March, so that opened up the possibility. She describes at first being very tired and coughing a lot. She had no energy to do anything and cancelled a lot of plans so she could stay home and rest. Then she describes experiencing (paraphrasing, not an actual quote here):

a step-function improvement in my health in the space of a few minutes while taking a shower. I decided I would join Bret for a dinner with some friends that evening. Everything was fine until I was at the restaurant and began coughing uncontrollably. 

My immediate thought was, "Whoa! What a sneaky and brilliant strategy for a virus to reproduce itself!" Of course viruses aren't really sentient or intelligent and aren't deliberately forming a strategy to jump to new hosts. But the ones who are effective at propagating themselves look as though they are following a strategy. There are plenty of examples of parasites hijacking their hosts and changing their behavior to make the parasite more successful. Toxoplasmosis famously makes mice fearless of cats (sexually attracted to cat urine, in some tellings), which allows it to continue its life cycle. There is a fungus that hijacks the tiny brains of their ant hosts. The virus Heather Heying experienced first compelled her to stay at home and rest. It got her to conserve energy, presumably giving the virus more resources to spend on its own reproduction. It then "let up", allowing her to feel good enough to go out in public. Whether it just "let up" in the sense of ceasing to attack her cells or perhaps hijacked her to make her feel better (release of adrenaline? some other mechanism? is this biologically plausible?), it convinced her she could get out of bed. Once she was among people, she felt sick and started coughing, which is the virus's strategy for getting to new bodies. She describes regretting that she may have infected several other people at the restaurant. Again, it's not clear that this was COVID-19. From the early timing and her description of the symptoms, this seems unlikely. But it's an interesting anecdote. Does the virus she had hijack people's behavior at the neurological level by literally monkeying with neurotransmitters? Or does it accomplish this in a more boring way by simply "making you feel sick"? Is it responding to environmental cues somehow? Or it is simply on some kind of natural timer? Did the virus really make her feel a "step function improvement" in her well-being? Or was it just the effect of a hot shower? Was she misremembering events from a few months ago? Real or not, it's an intriguing possibility.

In a recent post, I suggested that viruses that refrain from killing or incapacitating their hosts will be better at spreading. They will have "longer legs", so to speak. Heather Heying's anecdote suggested that this might not always be the case. If a virus hits upon this strategy of starting and stopping, temporarily fooling the host into thinking they are better, then they could be quite deadly and still be very good at spreading. COVID-19 hit upon a different strategy; it seems to have a very wide distribution of severities, with a lot of asymptomatic and mild cases in the left tail and a relatively high rate of hospitalizations and death in the right tail. That could also mean it's unlikely to mutate to become less deadly.