I think you’re being too modest, but I’ve removed it since you think it’s been eclipsed by something better.
Elizabeth
Karma: 4,210
What happens to suicide rates in a recession?
They rise, primarily in unemployed men.
The long version
I linked to this study above, but for completeness:
A review found that out of 38 studies:
31 of them found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicide rates.
2 studies reported a negative association,
2 articles failed to find any association
3 studies were inconclusive.
Unfortunately they didn’t share the effect size for most of these studies. Looking at other sources (notes here), I found anywhere from a 4% increase (across Europe and the Americas during the 2008 recession) to 60% (among men in Russia during the 1991 crisis). Studies typically found a much larger effect in men than women, sometimes finding no change in the female suicide rate at all. Different studies found different effects on different age groups; these felt too subdivided to me and I ignored them. Unsurprisingly, unemployment was positive correlated with suicide.
That 60% increase in Russia corresponded to an additional 30 deaths per 100,000 people per year, at a time when the overall death rate was 1300 deaths per 100,000 people. That 4% Europe/Americas increase represents 5000 deaths total, across three continents.
LW Coronavirus Agenda Update 3/31
My understanding is the stress tests for big banks aren’t very good- they encourage the bank to shore up against exactly the scenario they know will be tested, and no other. So I’m not very hopeful about them for grocery stores.
Produce will have trouble being picked because farms frequently rely on temporary immigrant workers, and the necessary immigration is banned. This is already happening in Europe, and seems likely to affect the US shortly. Even if it were not, migrant worker conditions seem pretty rife for disease transfer, so I’d expect a big hit to productivity even if they did show up.
Long term I expect this to shift consumption to things that require less human touch in harvesting, like grains and legumes.
ETA: Apparently Canada thought to exempt migrant farmworkers from the travel ban, but with air travel shut down is having much the same problem.
April Coronavirus Open Thread
[Question] What are the costs, benefits, and logistics of opening up new vaccine facilities?
One example: (I think, but have not hardcore verified, that) recessions tend to noticeably reduce births. This ends up being really great for the kids who were born into sufficient money, because when they mature there’s less competition for top colleges, jobs, etc.
Interesting. My impression is that recessions can start many different ways but typically kick off the same self-reinforcing cycle, so that unhappy economies end up being very alike as well.
[Question] What will happen to supply chains in the era of COVID-19?
Economics Explained argues that I’m wrong, and this recession was caused by high leverage on mediocre bets, just like the last two.
[Question] How will this recession differ from the last two?
[Question] What happens in a recession anyway?
UChicago professors use survey data to estimate 1⁄3 of jobs can be done at home, accounting for 44% of payroll. See here, scroll down to “How Many Jobs Can Be Done At Home?”
There are already different strains identified, seems plausible some are worse than others.
What percentage of the economy is “essential business?”, according to most shelter-in-place laws?
Ballpark: 40m, out of 160m total.
I made a spreadsheet, using the CA definition but numbers for all of the US. It’s not perfect- some industries I couldn’t find at all (communications is the biggest blank space), the divisions used by the statistics don’t map perfectly to the divisions used by the CA definitions, most numbers are from 2018, etc. But it’s a start.
I suspect there should be numbers somewhere we can look for how many people were laid off in the first 2 weeks,
3.3m people filed for unemployment insurance in America in the last week. The previous record was 700k in 1982, when the population was 230m
Early Appearance of Symptoms
Tl;dr COVID-19 might start with a cough, or a fever, or both, or occasionally maybe neither. It might start suddenly or slowly. It might remit and then come back worse.
This was hard to figure out. Most academic/medical papers start with the person’s first contact with the medical system, which is too late, so I looked at social media and news reports. These are obviously going to be biased towards people with symptoms severe enough to be interesting, but not so severe as to die. I also restricted myself to test-confirmed cases, which because I was also looking at mostly American sources biases things towards severe cases. And I’m counting on people to represent themselves honestly. So there’s a lot going against this sample.
In total I found 11 cases, plus two notes from doctors doing front line work. You can see my and Eli Tyre’s notes on every case here and the symptom tracking spreadsheet here. Both are messy and no work has been spent making them comprehensible to others.
From this very small and biased sample:
36% of people started with a cough on their first day (55% if you count two people who had very mild symptoms on day 1 and developed a cough on day 2)
64% started with a fever.
18% of people started with both on the same day.
18% started with neither symptom (but developed a cough on day 2)
78% eventually developed a cough
91% eventually developed a fever. The only person who didn’t eventually develop a fever I think might be a false positive, because his symptoms were very weird.
27% had digestive symptoms (mostly nausea)
⅓ of recovered people had been hospitalized.
On the other hand, this pre-print found that only 44% of patients had a fever on admission to the hospital, and 88% ever had one. The fevers can be intermittent. Both that paper and the doctor I just linked to report very high occurrence (85%+) of lymphocytopenia (low white blood cell count), but that is not very useful to diagnosing yourself, and it’s not clear when it starts.
Known scientific source Business Insider says that most cases start with fever. They do not mention their source.
Commonly Repeated Things I Don’t Believe
You may have heard that 80% of cases are mild. Keep in mind that that paper defined mild to include mild pneumonia, which I would classify as at least moderately severe.
Similarly, the paper reporting 50% of patients appeared at the hospital with digestive symptoms counted “loss of appetite” as a digestive symptom. Only 19% presented with a more definitely gastroenteric complaint like nausea or vomiting.
I can’t rule out it being 65%, or even higher. I would judge it as pretty unlikely, since I expect many of the asymptomatics on the Diamond Princess to in fact be presymptomatic.
Note that Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, and Amazon Pantry are all different services with different availabilities, and I can often find things on Prime Now that aren’t on Fresh (haven’t even tried with Pantry). Delivery slots haven’t been abundant but can typically be found within 2-3 days.