Be well, stay healthy, be prepared, and remember:
[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.FDR, inaugural address (1933)
- Hornless bull clones turn out to have questionable genomes.
- Scientists were so confident they didn't even look for transgenic DNA.
- No one's sure what to do with the offspring. Serious problem found with gene-edited celebrity cows
Part cow, part… bacterium? Biotech company makes heifer of gene ...
One of the first countries to deal with the epidemic was South Korea. Unlike China, South Korea is a fairly transparent society and data published by the Korean CDC (Center for Disease Control) can be more or less taken at face value.
A progress report is published every day on their website: here is today’s edition.
The most interesting part of the report is Table 5 Czech it Out
NSW records more than 50 new virus cases in over 24 hours
More
than 50 people have tested positive for coronavirus in Sydney in the
past 24 hours, the biggest jump in cases in Australia to date.
Who the heck even owns this company? Where is it?Biz risk outfit uses graphDBs to build mammoth compliance network
Advice for devops? Don't do
'wagile', says Dun & Bradstreet
Coronavirus Australia: Queensland researchers find ‘cure’, want drug trial News.com.au. Clinical trials of “[an] HIV drug, which has been superseded by ‘newer generation’ HIV drugs, and the other is an anti-malaria drug called chloroquine which is rarely used and ‘kept on the shelf now’ due to resistance to malaria.” More on hydroxychloroquine. Thread:
Coronavirus Australia: Queensland researchers find ‘cure’, want drug trial News.com.au. Clinical trials of “[an] HIV drug, which has been superseded by ‘newer generation’ HIV drugs, and the other is an anti-malaria drug called chloroquine which is rarely used and ‘kept on the shelf now’ due to resistance to malaria.” More on hydroxychloroquine. Thread:
1/OK let's talk about Plaquenil.
Plaquenil is the brand name for hydroxychloroquine, a drug that may help fight coronavirus.
It is commonly used to fight malaria and rheumatoid arthritis.https://www.drugs.com/plaquenil.html
Plaquenil is the brand name for hydroxychloroquine, a drug that may help fight coronavirus.
It is commonly used to fight malaria and rheumatoid arthritis.https://www.drugs.com/plaquenil.html
Saloni has long and detailed arguments against herd immunity. Here is Caplan on Hanson. Here is Kling on Hanson. Here is the Taleb critique. Here is the underlying Imperial College paper everyone is talking about. The bottom line is that “locking everyone up to bend the hospital admissions curve” might have to last for at least a year to really choke off the coronavirus.
I’m not going to recap this complex debate, which most of you already have some inkling of. Instead, I’d like to stress the issue of time consistency, noting that I’ll consider some extreme versions of policies to make exposition easier, even though no one advocates exactly those extreme versions.
Let’s say we expose lots of people to the virus rather quickly, to build up herd immunity. Furthermore, we would let commerce and gdp continue to thrive.
Even if that were the very best policy on utilitarian grounds, it might not be time consistent. Once the hospitals start looking like Lombardy, we don’t say “tough tiddlywinks, hail Jeremy Bentham!” Instead we crumble like the complacent softies you always knew we were. We institute quarantines and social distancing and shutdowns and end up with the worst of both worlds.
Alternatively, let’s say we start off being really strict with shutdowns, quarantines, and social distancing. Super-strict, everything closed. For how long can we tolerate the bankruptcies, the unemployment, and the cabin fever? At what point do the small businesspeople, one way or another, violate the orders and resume some form of commercial activity? What about “mitigation fatigue“?
Again, I fear we might switch course and, again, end up with the worst of both worlds. We would take a big hit to gdp but not really stop the spread of the virus.
I also can imagine that we keep switching back and forth. The epidemic yoyo. Because in fact we find none of the scenarios tolerable. Because they are not.
David Brooks postulates another possible form of time inconsistency:
What happens when there are a lot of people who’ve had the disease and become temporarily immune. They start socializing. Social distancing for the rest become harder if not impossible.
Plausible?
I greatly fear the epidemic yoyo. And figuring out how to deal with it may be at least as important as calculating the numerical returns from various consistent policies.
I thank an anonymized correspondent for the term “epidemic yoyo.”
CLAIM: Chinese overseas head home to safe haven under Beijing’s tough quarantine regime.
“Some Chinese abroad feel comfort of close family, health care, masks,
social control, quarantines and government surveillance is best
combination to beat pandemic.”
Unsettled by the coronavirus epidemic in the United States, 26-year-old Liu, an exchange PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, returned to China at the weekend.Color me extremely skeptical of this South China Morning Post report.
During his flights from Boston to Hong Kong and then to Beijing, Liu wore two layers of masks, goggles, plastic gloves and a raincoat to protect himself.
After arriving in Beijing, he spent 10 hours going through immigration and health checks. Despite the long journey and strict quarantine measures, Liu was happy to be back with his family.
As the coronavirus has spread across the world, infecting more than 193,000 people and killing more than 7,800, its presence in China has waned.
