COVID-19 notes
Why the
Coronavirus Is So Confusing
A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one
person to fully comprehend
… But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other
reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific
and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis
of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big
for any one person to fully comprehend. …
OPEN LETTER TO VIRGINIA GOVERNOR RALPH NORTHAM CALLING
FOR AGGRESSIVE ACTION TO #CRUSHTHECURVEVA
Yaneer Bar-Yam is a co-writer with Taleb. His motto is “Crush the Curve”,
not flatten it.
“Rather than kind of doing sort of the least effort that kind of will
slow it down, do the most effort and get it to stop and you’re done”
Whose coronavirus strategy worked best? Scientists
hunt most effective policies
Goldman Answers
Key Questions On COVID Testing, Treatments, & Vaccines
On the therapy side, there are two broad groups for COVID-19—prophylactic
vaccines and treatment. Prophylactic vaccines are intended to provide
protection from infection and confer immunity in people who have not been
exposed to COVID-19, while treatments address the different symptoms associated
with COVID-19, such as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). According to
the Milken Institute COVID-19 tracker, there were over 250 therapies in the
pipeline as of April 27, with 96 of these being vaccines and 55 antibodies. We
note that according to the WHO, there are 89 vaccines currently in the
pipeline, seven of which are in clinical development.
How to Develop a
COVID-19 Vaccine for All
But investment alone is not enough. To succeed, the entire
vaccine-innovation process, from R&D to access, must be governed by clear
and transparent rules of engagement based on public-interest goals and metrics.
That, in turn, will require a clear alignment between global and national
public interests. The first, critical step is to adopt a mission-oriented
approach that focuses both public and private investments on achieving a
clearly defined common goal: developing an effective COVID-19 vaccine(s) that
can be produced at global scale rapidly and made universally available for free.
Realizing this aim will require firm rules regarding intellectual property
(IP), pricing, and manufacturing, designed and enforced in ways that value
international collaboration and solidarity, rather than competition between
countries.
Why it’ll still
be a long time before we get a coronavirus vaccine
Trials of experimental coronavirus vaccines are already under way, but
it’s still likely to be years before one is ready and vaccination may not even
be possible
What the
Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine
If Trump says it, its BS, but if the Association of American Physicians
and Surgeons says it?
Hydroxychloroquine Has about 90 Percent Chance of
Helping COVID-19 Patients
Is remdesivir a
miracle drug to cure coronavirus? Don’t get your hopes up yet
Mark Manson: Nobody Knows
What is Going On.
Right now, we have two
large, complex systems. The first is a virus sweeping through the global
population and our combined efforts to mitigate it. The second is a declining
global economy. Both systems are incredibly difficult to measure and
understand, much less predict. Both are so large and unruly that we struggle to
even comprehend them in their entirety. And so far, pretty much everything
we’ve thought about either has been utterly wrong.
Let’s start with the first
system: the spread of the virus. Despite months of research and testing, we
still know very, very little.
Sweden forced to
admit significant under-counting of coronavirus deaths
Daniel
Schmactenberger: Mind viruses
during a pandemic
1. On cognitive bias:
bad-case forecasts based on the continuation of current trends are intended to
motivate changes to those trends to avoid those scenarios. These forecasts are
hopefully self-negating prophecies. If people follow the hygiene and physical isolation
suggestions, and institutions act accordingly, then the worst will be avoided.
Then people with conservative bias will say “see, the whole thing was overblown
hype, it didn’t turn out that bad”. But it only didn’t turn out that bad
because people followed the precautionary protocols. In the domain of effective
risk prevention, the result of effective work is that the risks don’t happen.
The majority of people don’t understand this and take for granted the relative
ease of their lives (from the catastrophes they believe were overblown) because
other people worked to mitigate them.
… 6. Not understanding
exponential growth rates:
… 9. Shortsightedness of the
economic harm concerns: yes, countrywide physical isolation will have a
profound effect on the economy, at every scale. But it will be less severe of
an effect than an illness spike overwhelming the medical system and increasing
susceptibility to more serious follow on effects, more total people getting
infected and needing more treatment and being less capable, more deaths, etc.
It’s also not looking at the bigger picture that the global economic system is
already fundamentally broken and only surviving due to artificial life support
measures (negative interest rate bonds, trillions in quantitive easing, bail
outs, deficit spending, etc.) This situation has the ability to catalyze a
needed restructuring of our global financial systems and may very well have to
before its over.
All of these orient people to misassess the actual risk landscape as well as the context that gave rise to it, and thus, what constitutes appropriate response.
Regular Related Fare:
Axios-Ipsos
Coronavirus Index, Week 7: Americans fear economic collapse
As Bills Pile
Up, Getting Unemployment Benefits In NY Is Still A “Kafkaesque Mess”
Roubini: The Coming
Greater Depression of the 2020s
After the 2007-09 financial crisis, the imbalances and risks pervading
the global economy were exacerbated by policy mistakes. So, rather than address
the structural problems that the financial collapse and ensuing recession
revealed, governments mostly kicked the can down the road, creating major
downside risks that made another crisis inevitable. And now that it has
arrived, the risks are growing even more acute. Unfortunately, even if the
Greater Recession leads to a lackluster U-shaped recovery this year, an
L-shaped “Greater Depression” will follow later in this decade, owing to ten
ominous and risky trends.
The Pandemic and
the Global Economy
There are still many uncertainties about the COVID-19
pandemic: about the extent of its spread, its severity in different countries,
the length of the outbreak, and whether an initial decline could be followed by
a recurrence. But some things are already certain: we know that the economic impact
of this pandemic is already immense, dwarfing anything that we have experienced
in living memory. The current shock to the global economy is certainly much
bigger than that of the 2008 global financial crisis, and is likely to be more
severe than the Great Depression. …
This very severe economic impact largely stems not from the pandemic
itself, but from measures that have been adopted across the world to contain
it, which have ranged from relatively mild restrictions on mobility and public
gatherings to complete lockdowns (and clampdowns) that have brought to a halt
most economic activity. This has meant a simultaneous attack
on demand and supply. During lockdowns, people (especially those
without formal work contracts) are deprived of incomes and joblessness
increases drastically, causing huge declines in
consumption demand that will continue into the period after the lockdown is
lifted. At the same time, production and distribution are halted for all but
essential commodities and services—and even for these sectors, supply is badly
affected because of implementation issues and inadequate attention to the
input-output linkages that enable production and distribution. Previous
regional and global crises have not entailed this near-cessation of all economic
activity. The deadly combination of collapses in
both demand and supply is why this time is truly different and has to be dealt with
differently….
…
This litany of horrors is well within the realm of the possible. The
saving grace is that these outcomes are not inevitable: they depend crucially
on policy responses. The terrible consequences described above are predicated
on international institutions and national governments not taking the measures
that could ameliorate the situation. There are both national and global
policies that could help, but they must be implemented quickly, before the
crisis generates even more humanitarian catastrophe. It is essential to ensure
that the policy responses do not (as they currently do) increase national and
global inequalities. This means that recovery strategies must be reoriented
away from handouts to large corporations without adequate regulation of their
activities, and toward enabling the survival, employment, and continued
consumption demand of poor and middle income groups, and the survival and
expansion of tiny, small, and medium enterprises.
…The second important international measure is dealing with external debt
problems. There should immediately be a moratorium or standstill on all debt
repayments (both principal and interest) for at least the next six months as
countries cope with both the spread of the disease and the lockdown effects.
…. While pushing for these major strategies for national governments and
international organizations, we need to be conscious of some concerns. One is
the fear that governments across the world will use the opportunity presented
by the pandemic to push for the centralization of power, with significantly
increased monitoring and surveillance of citizens, and increased censorship and
control over information flows to reduce their own accountability. This has
already started in many countries, and fear of infection is causing many people
across the world to accept invasions of privacy and forms of state control over
individual lives that months ago would have been seen as unacceptable. It will
be harder to sustain or revive democracy in such conditions.
The surprising
popularity of the Great Lockdown
Tim Morgan: Polly and the
sandwich-man.
Scoping Financial Risk:
…Generally, though, extremes, whether of optimism or of pessimism,
usually turn out to be wrong. Neither the Pollyanna nor the Sandwich-Board Man
approach is going to help. Whistling a cheerful tune isn’t going to give us
greater visibility on the post-crisis situation, but neither is walking around
wearing a placard proclaiming that “The End is Nigh”.
The rational and practical response is to reason from what we do know to
what we need to know. This is why, in economics and finance, we do need to try
to scope this crisis.
To do this effectively, it makes sense to adopt two working principles.
One of these is that we bring new thinking to bear, so that we’re not
just playing new tunes on the broken fiddle of ‘conventional’ economics.
The other is that we’re clear about the limitations imposed by the
uncertainties implicit in the situation.
This is where ‘scoping’ differs from prediction. What follows doesn’t try
to forecast what will happen, just to set some parameters on what might.
….
It is, indeed, reasonable to conclude that we’ve spent more than two
decades packing dynamite into the foundations of the financial structure.
Signs that economic reality might have started to break through had
become apparent well before the current crisis erupted. Sales of everything
from cars and smartphones to chips and components had already turned down,
world trade in goods was already shrinking, and severe financial stresses were
already emerging, particularly in China, and in some of the more irrational
parts of the global ‘cheap money’ economy.
This is why, rather than having hit us out of blue skies, this crisis is
really a bolt from the grey. Whether people had noticed these gathering dark
clouds largely depended on whether they were looking at the situation from a
point of view founded in reality, or were still persuaded by the ‘conventional’
tarradiddle that there was nothing too abnormal in the situation (or, at any
rate, nothing so abnormal that it couldn’t be handled by our omnipotent,
omniscient central bankers).
These past exercises in ‘adventurism’ have had a shared assumption, which
has resulted from a fundamental misconception about how the economy really
works.
In order to believe that we can boost the performance of the economy by
financial gimmickry – whether by pouring cheap credit into the system, or by
flooding it with even cheaper liquidity – you’d have to start by assuming that
the economy is a wholly financial system. If this assumption was correct, you
could conclude that fiscal and monetary policy are the effective levers of
control.
In reality, of course, these assumptions are mistaken. An economy that
exists wholly in the realm of the human artefact of money – and is unrelated to
the physical world in which we live – is a fiction.
As regular readers will know, my approach is based on the understanding
that the economy is not a financial system, but an energy dynamic.
Briefly stated, the surplus energy interpretation of the economy has
three central tenets.
The first is that nothing of any economic utility whatsoever can be
produced without the use of energy.
The second is that, whenever energy is accessed for our use, some of that
energy is always consumed in the access process (with the
consumed-during-access component known here as the Energy Cost of Energy, or
ECoE).
The third part of this “trilogy of the blindingly obvious” is that money
has no intrinsic worth, and commands value only as a ‘claim’ on the output of
the ‘real’ (energy) economy.
From this understanding, we can start with the observation that financial
‘claims’ have grown far more rapidly than the ‘real’ economy on which such
claims can be honoured. …
At the end of
“new abnormality”
For their part, economists and others are trying to gauge the possible or
probable extent of the damage that the coronavirus and the consequent
reductions in activity are going to inflict on the economy. Though Britain’s
OBR has presciently warned of the risk of longer-term “scarring” of the
economy, the general supposition seems to be that, whatever the severity and
the duration of the crisis turn out to be, it will be followed by a “recovery”,
involving both the eventual restoration of pre-crisis levels of activity, and a
reinstatement of the belief in “growth”.
The view expressed here is that trust in a full
economic “recovery” – irrespective of the time that is allowed for this to
happen – owes more to obstinacy and wishful-thinking than it does to logic. The
very word “recovery” presupposes that the economy pre-virus was robust, was
continuing to deliver meaningful “growth”, and constituted some form of
“normality”.
It’s worth remembering that, long before the crisis, world trade in
goods, and sales of everything from cars and smartphones to chips and
electronic components, had already turned down. Financially, extreme strains
were already emerging right across the system. Investors had already started
turning their backs on shale, and the “unicorn” absurdity – the bizarre
delusion that any company combining an “app” with a cash incinerator must come
good in the end – was already going the same way as the Emperor’s New Clothes.
There is, after all, precious little “normality” to be
found in a system which pays people to borrow, and which places an almost
mystical faith in the ability of central banks to ensure that asset prices only
ever move upwards.
No apology need be made for saying that a lot of us
had already realised that the “new normal” – of ever-rising asset prices, and
of an unending tide of cheap credit and cheaper money – had become absurd to
the point of the surreal. The best reason, in addition to simple observation,
for questioning the validity of this “new normal” mindset was a recognition
that the economy is an energy system, and that the energy equation driving
prosperity had already turned against us.
Rather than going into the technicalities of the energy-based
interpretation, we can simply state that the relentless rise in the Energy Cost
of Energy (ECoE) was applying a tightening squeeze to the surplus energy which
determines prosperity.
The very extent of the financial adventurism happening in plain sight
attests to the scale of bafflement and denial being required of the adherents
of the dogma of perpetual growth. It doesn’t help, of course, that our entire
financial system is wholly predicated on the implausible proposition that there
need be no limits to economic expansion on a finite planet.
The reality, then, is that an ending of growth – and a consequent
destabilising of the financial system – were lying in wait for us, needing only
a catalyst, which the coronavirus has now supplied.…
Regular Fare:
zilch
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Kate Marvel: I Am a Mad Scientist.
Climate – and
related -- Links April 2020.
Big Thoughts / Long Read:
Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation.
As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in
Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just
beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater
loosen their grip.
For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of
an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying
infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or
concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the
developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and
patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.
A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean
an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are
freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought.
Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the
state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher
in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic
renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in
participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire
to come together.
Other Fare:
German minister backs creating legal right to work
from home
Germany’s labor minister
wants to enshrine into law the right to work from home if it is feasible to do
so, even after the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
Failed state Fare:
Capitol
physician says Senate lacks capacity to test all senators
The Capitol’s attending physician said Thursday that coronavirus tests
will be available for staffers and senators who are ill, but not enough to
proactively test all 100 senators as the chamber comes back in session,
according to two people familiar with the matter.
“Come on!! They can’t even manage proper testing for 100
Senators!? This is genuine failed state stuff.”
Quotes of the Week:
Sam Leith: “If we do end or ease the Covid lockdown, it
probably won’t end up being on the advice of epidemiologists or even economists
- it’ll be because the way the media shapes the story brings an irresistible
pressure to bear.”
Tad Patzek: “Still, the US delayed by at least two months in
reacting to the pandemic, unprepared, and unwilling to shut down human traffic
in several states. No population lockdown in 10-12 Republican states is
equivalent to having a pissing section in a public swimming pool; everyone is
contaminated.”
Peter Watts: “That’s the Big Question,
of course. What happens after. If there even is an After.
Imagine The Who’s next Farewell Concert. People file into the local
stadium and find their seats; tinny music plays from the speakers up in the
rafters. It’s an hour or two before even the opening act sets up. And yet, a distressingly large number of people seem to think this
preamble comprises the Main Event.”
Fun Fare:
Honest
Government Ad | The Machine. the juice media, youtube. (warning: language)
While you’re at it: Honest
Government Ad | We're F**ked (could also be in the not just for the ESG
crowd section)
Pic of the Week:
Most states have
religious exemptions to COVID-19 social distancing rules
Tweets of the Week:
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