A friend sent me “The debate over ending social distancing to save the economy, explained” by Ezra Klein and asked for my thoughts. Here they are:
I absolutely think people need to be willing to have this discussion weighing the economic costs of essentially shutting off the economy, as uncomfortable as that may make them. In my opinion we should *all* want the economy to restart ASAP. Even if it really needs to be shutdown for a while, it should be as short as possible.
The hardest aspect of this is that the data on the virus is fuzzy. Very very fuzzy. How fatal is it? How many people who get it require a ventilator? I think you want enough social distancing to keep ventilator demand below supply.
There have been a number of arguments recently around the theme of: we have been overestimating the fatality rate. Some are more strongly argued than others.
I think the best way to know this is if we can do antibody testing of random samples to answer the question: Have a lot of people in the US already had it and developed immunity? If so, we can conclude this is actually not that fatal and we can end social distancing pretty soon.
Initial estimates from the WHO were that the fatality rate is around 3-4%. That is CRAZY high. The flu is like 0.1%.
For a while my best guess has been 1% but I’m just a guy on the internet. At the start of March my best estimate was 500k Americans dead. Really not sure how far down to adjust that based on the fact that we’ve gone hardcore social distancing.
I’m not sure when but at some point in the past 10 days I feel like I’ve gone from feeling like society is vastly underrating Covid to feeling like society is slightly overrating it.
I was definitely in favor of hardcore voluntary social distancing. Statewide shelter-in-place and shutdown of “non-essential businesses”…I don’t know. I know that’s a frustrating answer but it’s really hard to say and I felt even less certain when they really started picking up Monday. And I say this as a libertarian with a very strong skepticism of such harsh government measures.
As of today I’m leaning towards lifting them soon and we just need to worry about the major metro areas, but I don’t feel confident either way. I want that random sample antibody testing to make a determination about how many Americans we expect to require ventilators over the next few weeks.
I’m glad Ezra included the Hammer & Dance strategy, I think it does a good job of taking into account how miserable for society social distancing is.
One big point: Getting the cost/benefit between the possible deaths & the economic damage is basically impossible. Because of exponential growth, there isn’t really a point at which you can say “ok the deaths so far has been low, but we want to stop it at this point”. By that point, it’s already too widespread. Like a wildfire you can’t put out and just keeps spreading. So if you’re going to attempt mitigation, it is going to look premature.
I think the after-debate on this issue is going to be ugly. People are going to believe what they want to believe about how bad the virus really was and how much social distancing mattered and how much economic damage was done. It is going to be really hard to prove these theories one way or the other. We might attempt to compare say California (hard early lockdown) vs Florida (still not doing a shelter in place). But it will be hard and people will hand wave stuff away.