COVID-19 isn’t that bad for the vast majority of young and otherwise healthy people (no worse than a bad flu).
I disagree with this and disagree that it is the consensus. The risk of serious sequelae is uncertain but potentially quite high- certainly much worse than the flu.
All else being equal you don’t want to use antipyretics because fever is beneficial (to a point). Aspirin might reduce your chance of stroke but increase the strength of the infection.
I specifically looked into the smaller recessions and not the Great Depression because it’s just too weird. I think you might be right that this one will approach it, but before I look into the Great Depression I want to check out the 1970s oil shocks, which share with the present the common feature that they were caused by an actual thing changing, rather than financial tools misfiring. The Great Depression is also just so well known relative to the smaller recessions (although the Great Recession also has a lot of material on it).
Hey everyone who is following this closely- I’ve been sprinting madly for the last six weeks and hit my limit. You can expect a retrospective post and perhaps a phase 2 agenda in the next few weeks, but for now I am resting.
http://orbis.stanford.edu/ is an amazing customizable map showing transportation costs across the empire and for routes you choose in particular. You can set travel mechanisms, season, transfer costs, etc.
Article claims beer and soda are endangered by the reduction in driving. CO2 comes mostly from ethanol production, which is on the decline.
Double checking that you’ve seen this comment on the supply chain thread (which deals with produce)?
I’ve talked about simulacra levels with Ben a ton and this comment is the single most helpful thing in understanding them or explaining to others.
Not a lawyer, repeating the words of someone else who’s not a lawyer.
I talked to my bank (a 3 state credit union) today, specifically asking whether I counted as my own employee. The representative implied the SBA itself didn’t know, and if they did they hadn’t shared the information yet. She also very strongly implied that as long as I filled out the forms in good faith and my supporting documents were accurate, I would not be punished for fraud.
I think 30X for initial viral load might be too high, because it’s comparing symptomatic cases of smallpox to all cases of smallpox. The fair thing is to compare variolation against everyone who was exposed to smallpox, whether they developed symptoms or not.
Internet seems divided on whether or not subclinical smallpox even exists, so this probably isn’t a very large factor. I write it out mostly so if someone else has the same idea they don’t have to duplicate work.
Where do you get that the cats were sampled from shelters and hospitals? I see
Consistent with the high neutralizing titer, the owners of Cat#4, Cat#14 and Cat#15 were diagnosed as COVID-19 patients. Cat#1, Cat#5∼9 was from pet hospitals, while Cat#2, Cat#10∼13 were initially stray cats and kept in animal protection shelters after the outbreak.
So hospitals and shelters were certainly part of the sample, but it seems like they also tested some human patients’ cats.
Trends in divorce continue basically unabated
This paper, the only long-time-scale survey I could find, reports a minor negative correlation between unemployment rates and divorce. However looking at their graph, the relationship is obviously mild.
For posterity: I expected there to be a large, detectable drop in divorce rates during recessions and then a spike as soon as the recession ended.
Some states (Washington, California) already have mail-in voting available for everyone, I don’t think there are any federal legal barriers to expanding it.
Religious attendance is down already, ideally to zero. What are the long term effects of that?
Brainstorm:
Permanently weaker social ties, especially among the elderly and rural.
-> More depression, suicide, addiction
Longer time to notice that someone has died and for the body to be discovered (for suicides or otherwise).
Families that rely on church assistance go hungry, leading to permanent physical and mental deficits for children.
Churches receive fewer donations (both because of lack of physical presence and the recession), some are forced to close.
I wanted to make a numerical prediction for this but couldn’t find numbers on # of churches over time except for LDS, which has been growing.
I expect LDS to make it through this pretty well, possibly even strengthened, because they’ve led their members to prepare for this and because I expect them to institute social reinforcement over distance.
Speed up of the transition to digital services. Gains reduce but do not entirely disappear when social distancing is lifted.
Membership takes a permanent hit, faster than counterfactually.
Religious Service Attendance Stays Flat
I was really surprised to find a single academic paper in the last 40 years on religiosity and economic conditions, which was not available online. It reports a “strong” countercyclic effect in religious participation in evangelical Protestants but procyclic effect in mainline Protestants, in the 2001 recession. Meanwhile a Pew poll and a Gallup poll show no change in religious participation during the 2008 recession.
For posterity: I’d predicted an increase in attendance.
It’s pretty wide ranging and I don’t have time to find all of it, but off the top of my head
Jim’s Question on long term effects
The Diamond Princess Data (both initial death rates and the subsequent finding that half the asymptomatic cases had severe chest x-ray abnormalities)
A baseline expectation that it would be weird for something to be 10x worse in one population and not at all worse in another