That probably is why the shut down and lack of demand line up so closely for businesses in the Bay Area.
Either way, Inslee and Breed deserve more credit. Preventing a crisis is superior to responding effectively after its started.
They both started off as a complete joke on this. Cuomo has at least since been improving, but de Blasio remains a complete joke. He's incapable of so much as even closing some empty streets (or some lanes on streets) to give pedestrians more space to spread out. Other cities have been doing this to great success, but de Blasio has only ever understood things from the perspective of being behind a windshield.
The disease hit New York first before it hit anywhere else in the US and hence had a lot of time to develop. I heard from one source, that it was already present in New York back in december and that one of the first worldwide cases came to New york early. that was from a Joe Rogan podcast episode.
Scroll down and click "city" instead of country. SF bookings on OpenTable were consistently down starting the last week of February. Your restaurant might have had different performance for a number of reasons.
They would have nearly all vanished once the hospitals started filling up had there been no formal order. And then it would have lasted longer.
I also skipped a former colleague’s leaving town party for the same reason.
So I would have needed to have stopped doing things several weeks prior to the government actually getting off its ass and acting in order to be safe, but I didn't have the understanding of how widely in the community it was already spreading at that point, or how severely we were under-testing. As a city we were unbelievably late to act, and the over 10,000 dead in NYC alone (with ~750 more every day) are a testament to that.
It's the peak of absurdity to imagine the city somehow going on as normal under this unbelievable toll if only we weren't being told to shelter in place, when the only street noise you can hear a lot of the time is ambulance sirens.
Wishing you a speedy recovery fellow HN reader friend.
I've since mostly recovered, but my lungs are still giving me problems (this is apparently expected; it can take months to recover from severe pneumonia, so I'm doing better than that at least). I haven't gone running in over a month whereas I used to go several times a week, and even stuff like playing Beat Saber has kicked my ass. Ironically, wearing masks is hard for me now because they interfere with how much oxygen you can take in, so I can wear them while walking leisurely, but I start walking faster, or try to carry a heavy load (groceries), or climb stairs with a mask on, then I really start feeling shitty. So I haven't been wearing a mask while outside and only don one for being inside stores (which is fine, it's been way more than 14 days since I last experienced any symptoms of infection).
So yeah, a weird illness, quite different from the usual human viruses like the cold flu that we all know and "love". I don't know if I have any tips other than don't expect to get better from it quickly (you don't bounce back in a few days like you would from the cold), and lying prone helps you breathe better (but I fortunately never got serious enough to the point where I was struggling to breathe even while being sedentary; it was only after activity). Oh, and if you do anything like smoke or vape (I don't), quit that right now. You want your lungs to be in the best possible condition before going into this because you're gonna lose a lot of capacity and if that puts you below the level required to sustain your basic sedentary metabolism, you could die, or at the least require supplementary oxygen in a hospital. Heck, take up running or some similarly aerobic activity now if you haven't already; that'll help.
The death rate isn't likely to be that high (even without medical treatment), but if even a million Americans die, that's a cost of $10T to the economy right there.
You can easily why see shutting things down to prevent all those deaths is worth it.
We did it because risking 30M pneumonia victims was unthinkable, even before we count the extra heart attack/assault/cancer victims while the hospitals collapse.
The numbers work out; it's absolutely worth shutting down the economy for some number of months to prevent the loss of a million lives. Obviously the numbers don't work out to do so indefinitely, but for the one month so far and the upcoming few, definitely.
And yes assuming immunity, which seems likely to be the case for most people, even if not permanent.
*assuming survival
"It's entirely fair to conclude" does not mesh with "Time will tell whether this was the right approach".
If the same protective effects could have been achieved with a less disruptive move, then your conclusion would be justifiable. It is not, however, at all appropriate to jump to that conclusion yet-- time has not told.
It will probably be years before good conclusions can be drawn from this due to the difficulty of correcting for starting conditions and intrinsic factors.
Sweden is a relatively insular, already 'socially distant' community. It appears infections there started with fewer parties later. So it would take considerable analysis using data that doesn't exist yet (including the eventual outcome in Sweden) to draw any conclusions about what might have happened had their approach been applied to, say, NYC.
Within the US-- a more comparable population-- there are many locations where the response was weaker and so far the results don't look especially good.
Ultimately the fact remains that the majority of the economic "losses" we have now are hallucinatory. When a building is bombed it is physically destroyed and the labor and most of the materials that went into building it are irretrievably lost. The people inside are killed and cannot be productive in the future. In our current crisis, our losses are primarily losses of confidence (sure, there are some cases of agricultural goods spoiling). The people our response have saved but left without work are still alive and can go back to work when the crisis is over, particularly if we act to make sure they're protected in ways other than their health. Even if we cared exclusively about the economic consequences of this event it would be extremely foolish to favor the increase destruction of productive human lives in order to optimize for short term market confidence.
It doesn't mesh because you're omitting, "...could have led to substantially less economic loss".
It won't be years before good conclusions can be drawn. Some states are already reporting that cases have already gone past their peak. Most countries that had outbreaks in March are seeing rates of cases going down. We'll probably be able to have a good idea of the scope of this pandemic by the end of summer.
The economic harm is not hallucinatory. What is hallucinatory about 3 million people out of work in the span of a few weeks? You write that these people can go back to work when the crisis is over, but that is not true. If your employer goes out of business, or has too few customers to sustain as many employees, people are going to have to find new jobs. You also write about the loss of productivity in terms of the people who died due to the virus. That is something to account for, but the bulk of the virus' victims are not of working age.
Whether or not you're comfortable with valuing human live does not alter the fact that we put value on life all the time. Whether it's deciding insurance payouts, worker's compensation, or healthcare spending we're constantly expressing the value of lives in dollar terms. Current predictions put the economic impact per life saved by social distancing at ~$190 million. Even if we assume that social distancing is only responsible for half the economic downturn, we're still talking about nearly $100M per death averted. Saying that this is excessive, and concluding that restrictions were excessive is entirely fair. How much money would a state funded healthcare system spend on its worst case patients? A lot less than $100 million.
That sounds, on the face of it, implausibly high. To run some numbers - estimates of how much of the population would be infected without countermeasures run 40-70%, and death rates run 1-2% (this would be much worse if hospitals were overrun by an estimated 8 million ICU patients over a few months, but we'll use very conservative numbers). The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months?
Italy and Denmark have initiated random testing have revised death rates to be far lower, less than once percent. Random testings substantially increases the denominator, since it captures the vast majority of people who did not have serious symptoms. The infected cruise ship had a death rate of 0.7%, which is even more surprising giving the older average age of cruise passengers. The fact that places are reporting higher death rates than a population disproportionately older should have raised eyebrows. Again, the data itself is not suspect it's failing to account for the selection bias it imposes. But this does result in some very skewed conclusions on your end:
> The US population, with 40% infected and 1% of those dead, leaves us with about 1.3M deaths, times your $190M per life is $25T, or about 15 months of US GDP. Is that really the claim here? The equivalent of bringing GDP to 0 for 15 straight months?
1.3 million deaths is an order of magnitude more than what is being projected. Earlier this month, the range given was 100,000 - 240,000. Now this projection has been lowered first to 80,000 and now to 60,000:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-coronavirus-wednesd...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/0...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/fauci-say...
You don't think anyone else has noticed this? The estimates have been based on lower numbers than the raw data.
> The infected cruise ship had a death rate of 0.7%
I agree that the Diamond Princess was particularly interesting because of the high testing rate. Your number is very clearly wrong, though. The actual numbers reported was 13 deaths in 712 cases, or 1.8%. They also have 55 unresolved cases, and someone who has been sick for this long is looking at worse odds than the general population.
> 1.3 million deaths is an order of magnitude more than what is being projected. Earlier this month, the range given was 100,000 - 240,000. Now this projection has been lowered first to 80,000 and now to 60,000:
First of all, those numbers are going down precisely because of the measures you're complaining about. Second, they're clearly implausible. The 60,000 estimate is from 9 days ago. Meanwhile, the current official count is just shy of 40,000, and the excess deaths have consistently been double or more of the estimate for COVID-19 deaths (Italy, for example, is reporting 6x [1], while NYC was until a recent change in their reporting showing 2x [2] - but we haven't seen these changes anywhere else in the country).
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-is-only-...
[2] https://gothamist.com/news/surge-number-new-yorkers-dying-ho...
If we assume humans are slabs of talking meat which are worthless except for their economic properties (productivity and consumption), it is still not a likely economic win to let enormous numbers of them die because the economy is made of people. If you kill the people you kill the economy directly-- and, of course, people aren't going to continue like normal while others are dying around them regardless of what state policy is.
So you are making a false comparison of the economic cost, the alternative is not "do nothing, let millions of innocent people die, and have the economy continue as if nothing happened". That isn't a possible alternative-- the economy couldn't continue as if nothing had happened if millions have died or are dying.
Imagine for a moment, for the purpose of discussion, that we didn't need to keep food, medical supplies, power, etc flowing during the intervention. In that silly and unrealistic hypothetical it would be reasonable to pause the economy-- basically say "okay, for the next year all contracts are paused, all transfer of value prohibited, and in a year we just start 2020 over again for all legal and contractual purposes". Just like weekends are often disregarded in contracts but at a massive scale. No businesses would fail, nothing would change (except the people that died along the way).
It's not possible to actually do this fanciful thing, because, unfortunately, we still need to keep utilities, food, medical services, etc. running and because everything is interconnected you can't just pause everything else. But if we could it would be a completely reasonable response.
To the extent that, e.g. businesses fail due to this is a failure of our imagination and political will. Other than the small amount of actual damage done from spoiled goods (and deaths from the pandemic)-- all other economic consequences are a product of our beliefs and actions, and are not actual unavoidable losses in the same way that a death is. The stimulus is just one (half-assed) example of the potential ways that we can act to mitigate the direct economic harms while still protecting lives.
Of course, I do also think that people's lives have tremendous intrinsic value, but that isn't part of my argument here. Instead, I was attempting to argue that even a dispassionate spherical economist murder bot should-- if it were behaving rationally-- respect that the irrecoverable loss of many human lives is something of tremendous economic significance because of the central role of as agents and targets of all economic activity.
You're also disregarding the potential economic benefits of this disruption. Causing weak businesses to fail can be economically beneficial in the long run, as might the radical increase in telecommuting and video conferencing, or the development of more pandemic robust services (e.g. will we finally see automated grocery stores become a thing?) or the numerous other ways that this event might help the economy escape other local minima.
The idea that the economy would collapse due to the amount of people dying of coronavirus does not hold water. Even if widespread infection did occur, the mortality rate among working age people is well below 1%.
You can't argue against measure X by using the successful results of X to say that X didn't work in the first place!
And right that the question is to compare the actual death toll to the death toll that would have happened without social distancing. Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). That's 250,000 additional deaths. That would be $100M per death averted assuming a $2.5T cost of the social distancing measures - that's ~10% of GDP. The US so far is expecting losses about twice that.
There is substantial evidence for other viral infections that infection severity (spanning from asymptomatic to dead) is related to dosage.
There is limited information so far for covid19 but some informal evidence that this is true for it too: Young healthcare workers appear to be dying a a much higher rate than similarly healthy members of the public who are sars-cov-2 positive.
If this is the case, social distancing will reduce the number of people who get serious infections and reduce the number who die.
Even if not, preventing overload of the hospitals will significantly reduce the number who die. Delaying infections until we better know how to treat the disease from anti-virals to simply care techniques will almost certantly reduce the number who die.
> Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). T
CDC's projection was 1.7 million dead before accounting for hospital overload.
If you have a study that projects what the fatalities would have been with a shorter isolation period (e.g. only march and first two weeks of April), that would be noteworthy. Pointing to this early CDC study as a figure for what would have transpired had the economy not been shut down is not sound.
1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coro...
Not so, for example the mortalities from the diamond princess are _higher_ than the ones being used to drive those projections. The fact that it takes time for people to die has held down the estimated mortality during exponential case growth.
Effectively every reputable source is observing that the early death rate projections were substantially inflated. China's reported death rate is 0.5% - and they're the ones with the most experience with the virus. Germany only recent started random testing. They previously had a fatality rate of 2%, but after random testing they found that 14% of the population already had antibodies - thus lower the death rate down to 0.37% [1]. There's a vast difference between asking "out of the people who got sick enough to go to the hospital, what portion people infected with coronavirus died?" and "what portion of people infected with coronavirus died".
You're using old data. 2% of the diamond princess infected have died so far. Another 7% of the infected are still reported as not recovered yet.
I would love to be able to look inside your head and see what you think society would look like right now in the middle of an uncontained global pandemic with everyone just going about business as usual, continuing to pack bars and restaurants, no companies cutting back on jobs, etc. It's an utter, complete fantasy land.
That figure includes all mortality from pneumonia, a minority of which is caused by the seasonal flu.
Social isolation happens to have been (responsibly!) instituted as a matter of public policy, but it was going to happen via fear at some point anyway. The economics doesn't care, really.
That's not a fact. That's your opinion.
The way I read it is that we have no reason to think the economic drop would be less severe if we didn’t have a shutdown. This is because people dying could hurt the economy just as much, if not more.
It is assuming facts not in evidence to suggest the economy would be better off with more deaths but less of a lockdown.
Most cases undetected. Vast majority of people hit hard by it are the sickly elderly, people largely already out of the economic game.
This would have barely been an economic blip if not for the lockdowns.
Isn't that entirely hypothetical though? Find it hard to take such statements seriously when the experience worldwide is so widely varied.
The evidence is clear that lockdowns have caused this economic impact, how can anyone actually make accurate estimates of the alternative?
I think a lock down of sorts would've happened eventually, no matter what. Once restrictions are relaxed, a large percentage of people are still going to be very, very cautious. I will not board a plane or sit in a movie theater any time soon.
We moved the economic impact earlier to trade down health impacts. In order for there to not be some similar level of impacts, we either have to imagine a scenario where the disease was many times more benign than it has demonstrably been in some places, or where people ignore news as things get sufficiently dire and continue business as usual rather than dramatically adjusting behavior from normal circumstances. And both those things have to be true in order for the latter not to make a terrifying contribution, which would also make dire economic impacts: dead or damaged people are much harder to get back into the demand side of the economy than housebound or unemployed people.
If you're thinking of worldwide counterfactuals, and know of any society that has a story involving staying broadly open that didn't use effective mass testing and contact tracing early, then specifics would be an interesting contribution.
Additionally, we have saved lives (and animal lives) by shutting down parts of the economy. That should be included as a silver lining to the whole thing.
1. Essential+Unaffected: demand will be steady because there is no other choice, i.e. food, communication, ecommerce.
2. Horribly Affected: maybe even illegal to open right now, and when they open demand will be down significantly i.e. restaurants, bars, live entertainment, travel, some segments of education like language schools that cater to international, conferences and trade shows. Maybe back to full strength in 2 years but not going to be fun for a while, huge hit to demand.
3. Affected proportional to total global economy: If the overall economic activity goes down 20%, some businesses are going to track that. Transportation, business services, maybe banking.
The governments of the world certainly have the ability to stimulate asset bubbles, but I'm not sure that they can generally stimulate business activity other than on the demand side, i.e. rising incomes for labor. I think there could be a stratification of national economies performance over the next 2 years based on the ultimate success of their COVID-19 response. I'm seriously considering if I should try to predict the most robust regional response and look at moving there post crisis for the next 2 years or so. I think there could be significant differences. Not necessarily who is suffering the least, but who is going to emerge most vigorously.
I have a friend who owns a factory in a very unsexy niche industry (packaging). They're relishing this crisis, because they manage the business very conservatively in terms of cash flow and leverage, and are expecting many of their competitors to go bankrupt in the near future. When the dust settles, they'll be one of the few left over, which means they can charge much higher rates. This'll likely be the story in many industries.
Rich monopolies like Google and Facebook are going to do fine. (And note that both of them are still hiring, meaning they can potentially clean out the supply of engineers while many of the newer growth unicorns have instituted hiring freezes.) Marginal players in competitive industries are going to get killed.
Both of those are primarily dependent on ads for revenue and ad spending is already dropping precipitously, as far as I've heard?
Same...always better to thrive than to survive and we all get to choose :)
A contraction of 20% only puts us nominally back less than a decade. People didn't have to be sacrificed back then, and they don't today.
There are interventions we do need, but if everyone took a 20% hit as a group instead of a de facto Hunger Games, it wouldn't be nearly as ghastly.
Off topic, but that is a brilliant framing. I'm going to steal and use that repeatedly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville
Oh, then the lagging indicator which are deaths of despair will surely be worth it: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/18/817687042/deaths-of-despair-e...
By delaying the formal response it would have been possible to get most of of the economic harm of distancing while only getting a small part of the benefit.
Many people started distancing in the couple weeks before the shelter in place orders started. I know people that quit jobs to get away from the public, etc.
Yet many of those people who were increasing their distance, lowering their economic activities, etc. were also living with others who were in denial about the pandemic and where nothing short of a vague threat of citation/arrest or a closure of their hangouts would cause them to reduce their interaction... at least until people they know started dying, which would be too late for intervention (yet at that point they'd still drop out of economy!). In a "no order" world, you'd still get most of the economic hit of that household shutting down-- but they might often still get the infection, contribute load on the hospitals, and potentially die because one member of the household was less responsive to common sense.
Various legal and economic mitigations would also be less likely to exist absent an official response.
Unfortunately, both options are not mutually exclusive
The only thing that might matter more broadly than prosperity/poverty is life and health.
Now we know the virus is not quite as deadly as anticipated (around 2%). And we know the economic impact is disastrous (+15% unemployment in the US after 3 weeks). So the strategy will have to be re-evaluated eventually.
My opinion is that politicians taking the decisions are too remote from people experiencing economic hardship, so they will let the economy get much much worse for way too long.
There aren’t going to be any large gatherings or sporting events for the foreseeable future, lots of people are starting to wear masks and are doing much better as far as hygiene and social distancing are concerned. Why _can’t_ we start to think about getting things to slowly go back to normal? Keep the elderly (way easier for them to quarantine) and sick at home. If you can work from home, continue to do so. Everything else, figure out how to make it work within the framework of social distancing. There has to be more than a choice between “total lockdown” or “everyone’s gonna die.”
Why do you think that is? Because the stay-at-home orders worked. NY is the worst case scenario and you want to stop things before they get that bad.
If we had a magic dial for precisely tuning social distancing measures to cause minimum economic harm and death, we'd use it. Since we don't we have to err on one side or the other. So far we've erred on the side of caution, accepting short-term economic damage. As things get less crazy these measures will be gradually scaled back. It doesn't mean they were never necessary.
Y2K is going to be a big deal if we don't do anything about it. We do something about it. People complain Y2K wasn't a big deal.
That, like this, means we're doing things right. Maybe we're going a little extreme, but the alternative is likely worse, and there is never a magic dial to spend just the right amount of effort/money/time.
It's unfortunate that it's so easy to find preparation wasteful when it ends up not being necessary. But, we all have different life experiences.
To be fair, though I agree with you in general, NY-- esp NYC-- is much more dense than the rest of the country and as a result R(effective) may have been much higher there than other places. It may be the case that much stronger measures were needed there then in many other places.
So while it is true that part of the reason other places are less bad is because the policies worked, differences between the locations may also play a significant role.
The interior of the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to support exponential growth. Nurses and doctors and hospitals being idle is a sign that we chose the SF path, not the NY path.
The economic impact is of course absolutely terrible and this is shaping up to potentially be as bad as the Great Depression was. But letting the virus ravage small towns and cities without adequate support would be worse both economically and in terms of loss of life.
Regions hardest hit by COVID-19 seem (informal take) to have largely been large, dense, sprawling cities. with poor public health infrastructure or responses.
In the US, it's currently mostly Northeast cities, generally surrounding New York, doing the worst. Wuhan (11 million) is also huge. Milan (Italy), Madrid (Spain), Tehran (Iran), London (UK) have also fared poorly, especially relative to their countries.
Outbreaks in less populated regions can and do occur. -- though often within institutional populations or equivalents -- cruise ships, retirement / nursing homes, prisons and jails, as well as anti-science religious groups, notably.
And not all megacities have been hit, especially those with solid monitoring systems, response plans, and infrastructure: Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, especially.
But this is a pattern to watch going forward.
Developing nation megacities seem at high risk.
This time, it's global and nearly every sector is affected; there won't be a place to hide. The US is already at unemployment rates not seen since the recessions of the 1920s/1930s and the bleeding hasn't stopped yet.
These unicorn collapses are just the rumble, not the avalanche itself and anybody not terrified right now, darned well should be.