In which jon-nyc stakes out an unconventional opinion on the Covid-19 outbreak
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I became a commercial pilot and flight instructor and bought a few planes. I taught for about 10 years. Last year I moved to southern Virginia and it has been over a year now since I've flown. I might still get hooked back up. I have kept my instructor certificate and medical current.
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There was a recent Rand report which tried to look at the "strength" of a lock down versus the number of deaths and versus the economic impact.
Obvious, that the higher strength the lockdown, the less deaths, but more economic impact.
I believe that they were using a economic impact of one life = $10 MM USD.
The conclusion was that there was a pretty bad payback for decreasing teh strength of the lockdown. In other words, the decrease in economic impact was not greater than the increased loss of life.
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@Jeffrey said in In which jon-nyc stakes out an unconventional opinion on the Covid-19 outbreak:
Yes. We now have three.
I think the third had been born before I last saw you, which I'm guessing was 2012, I want to say your middle boy came with you to my son's party at the science place on Atlantic ave.
Seems like a long time ago!
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What is your opinion on the reopen stuff? Overheard from a dr I know “Open for business means the ICU has room for you.” On the other hand, the current shutdown is not sustainable economically or psychologically for most people for much longer.
I have no specific answers to any question.
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@Jeffrey said in In which jon-nyc stakes out an unconventional opinion on the Covid-19 outbreak:
What is your take on the open up stuff? I suspect actual mobility among the population is not that different. Under shelter in place some people push the edges, under open for business many stay home.
It's an interesting question, untangling how much social distancing is voluntary and would happen without top down rules.
A few thoughts, that don't necessarily cohere:
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I think the zeitgeist is a big driver independently of rules. I posted google data showing a surprising amount of conformity in mobility reduction across states that rolled out their rules at slightly different times.
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I think that goes both ways, right now there seems to be a sense of relief even in NYC that the worst is behind us, and people are relaxing their behaviors more. Yet the rules haven't changed, as you know. (curious if you've personally seen this, I have second hand reports from friends about this weekend for example, and have read numerous reports on twitter).
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there's obviously a lot of variation across individuals. I don't know how this will play out in practice. You could imagine a best case scenario where near-universal mask usage more than makes up for our other social distancing sins, and we do ok.
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You can also imagine a 'worst of both worlds' scenario where the number of people who are not compliant with (non-coercive) measures is large enough to be epidemiologically significant but not large enough to be economically significant. IOW (pulling numbers out of my ass) say 1 in 5 people act like its 2019. That might be enough to jack the effective R up substantially but it still doesn't fill the restaurants or the airlines, etc. Possibly some light version of this is happening in Sweden??? Too early to tell.
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@Jeffrey said in In which jon-nyc stakes out an unconventional opinion on the Covid-19 outbreak:
Hong Kong is interesting. High density, subways, near Wuhan. 5 fatalities. Near universal mask wearing. Maybe miracle technology is a mask. Just speculating.
I could imagine universal masks making a huge difference. Still meaning to read what's been published about impact of individual social distancing measures in various environments.
Having said that, from what I've read Hong Kong has been locked up pretty tightly, has heavily restricted travel, and has a killer contact tracing system. They also have a lot of memory of the SARS experience.
But I really don't know that much about it.
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@Jeffrey said in In which jon-nyc stakes out an unconventional opinion on the Covid-19 outbreak:
How is your son? How is video-school? Did you shelter in place or go elsewhere?
Video school is not that impressive IMO, but I keep him busy and his day full, He's eating up the math curriculum on Khan academy, coding every day using projects I assign him (the online coding stuff for kids is too much about moving sprites around, and not enough about algorithms and data manipulation. So I'm inventing my own projects for him). Rachel assigns him novels and writes out questions he has to answer.
The kid is a crazy history buff. Schools me regularly (at least on facts, if not broad understandings) and I read a lot of history. He's in 5th grade and is doing the AP History course on Khan - seriously. And it's his favorite hour of the day.
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@Jeffrey said in In which jon-nyc stakes out an unconventional opinion on the Covid-19 outbreak:
What is your opinion on the reopen stuff? Overheard from a dr I know “Open for business means the ICU has room for you.” On the other hand, the current shutdown is not sustainable economically or psychologically for most people for much longer.
I have no specific answers to any question.
We cross posted on the open stuff.
But IMO we sorta failed with our lockdown. The proper thing to do was nuke the curve, not flatten it. And that would have required more than we were willing to do. (in fact me opining on that was the genesis of this thread).
I agree people have limited tolerance for it, but it wasn't supposed to be permanent. The idea was to get R low enough so that new cases would be a manageable number, meaning within our capacity to test, trace, and isolate. That seems unlikely to happen, though many states are still trying.
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Having said that, I think its a bit simplistic to say 'this is unsustainable'.
It implies we can just wave it all away. But as we've talked about much of this economic damage is not attributable to enforced supply crunch, but rather a huge voluntary drop in demand. They can open up businesses but they can't make people visit them. It may well sustain itself regardless of what policies we adopt.
(one of my pet peeves has been Covid Doves assuming the economic damage is basically entirely attributable to the lockdown)
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Oh - your question about where we're holed up - in Westchester at home.
We talked about going elsewhere, but its pretty easy and comfortable to isolate here as long as we can get food delivered, which we've been able to do (weekly FreshDirect reservation).
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Are people in NYC relaxing their behaviors? I was out and about this last weekend, including seeing some of the parks and areas talked about.
I think social behavior has improved a lot. 90% mask wearing. Speaking happens at a distance. Compared to early March it is vastly better. Some parks a bit crowded. Some people still think this is all nonsense and refuse to do anything. If you think that masks work and outdoor transmission in the open air and breeze and sun is not a high risk, NYC is fine. If open sun and masks are not enough in 4 weeks we will know. There has never been 100 percent compliance. I thought it was the highest ever the last week or two, esp. on masks which I speculate is a big deal.
Per the Sweden model it is possible that young people giving it to each other in a park is a good thing as it creates herd immunity among those exposing themselves voluntarily and with the least personal risk. Nate Silver calculates that NYC is already seeing some mild curve bending due to herd antibodies as we hit 20-25 percent exposure.
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Re: nuke the curve. Not possible in a democracy that already had community spread for 6-8 weeks. Wuhan hit a replication rate of .3 by locking people in their homes using military force. No democracy has hit a replication rate below .6 to .8 once community spread occurred.
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I'm not confident our exposure is that high.
Cuomo announced 21% antibodies in NYC in the 15k person statewide study that closed the other day but I think (though I'm not certain) there was selection bias issues, though not as bad as the two California studies.
I haven't been able to get definitive info on that yet.
However both NYPD and FDNY(EMS) did serology studies and came up with 11% and 17% respectively. Hard to believe that they would be less exposed than the general population especially since the infection and fatality rates of the NYPD exceed that of general population. (I don't know the rates of EMS)
