igor67

I interpreted the news as, it is possible that more people than normally happens for other diseases don't have a robust response so handing out immunity cards as a policy is premature type statement. Combined with long term uncertainty about the viruses mutation rate and such, I think they are concerned that jumping into that type of policy risks not only lives later on, but could undermine confidence (they said I was immune!!). If I was handicapping odds for a viable vaccine and/or treatment this particular bit of news doesn't change really how I would set those odds or even the timetable.

Thanks for the correction on the percentage.

The testing increases are a positive sign both from increasing capacity and if you couple that with even a flatline in hospitalizations it suggests you are getting closer to closing the gap of the unknown number of infected. It doesn't indicate where everyone is on the contact tracing capacity though, which we are going to need or those trends will reverse.

Great to see folks arguing about sports. Thought number 2- Gary Anderson owes the state of Wisconsin so this better work.

I used to rant about Boomers and Social Security, complaining that all their money was parked on the shores of Vietnam. It's kind of true afterall. But I changed my mind for a few different reasons. 1) as mentioned above the drumbeat of empirical data that most people don't save enough. Second though was the realization though that most of the cost increases were driven by life span increases and demographic transition. Life span increases may continue incrementally, but the demographic transition is nearing maturity (aka the percentage of the population in different age categories is closer to stabilizing). Three no one complains when private companies fail to meet 10, 15 or 30 year projections. With my school budgeting experience I came to viscerally appreciate the importance of modest year to year corrections. Without that level of adjusting any 30 year projection for any company or government is going to end up either controlling the world because they have made so much money or be bankrupt many times over. Also remember our SSI is 13%, 6.5 from you and 6.5 from your employer. Very small changes in the program now would have a very large impact on how long there continues to be a SSI 'surplus' The surplus is actually one of the last things I realized is problematic. What would happen to the stock market if a mythical investor let's call him Warren Gates, suddenly bought 3 trillion dollars in stocks(AKA the value in the trust fund)? Of course it would over inflate prices on tons of stocks, Buffet has made a lot of comments during the last Bull market for not having enough places to park merely Billions in cash because the value isn't there. So there is reason to be concerned about over supplying the stock market with capital, when there are plenty of very useful investments like roads, bridges and public health that generate huge economic benefits.

It sounds more like the packing industry was resistant to figuring our a way to alter their production methods to make them less likely to spread. A relevant concern is how far outside of the packing plants are these clusters going to spread? 500 is a lot of chances for it to have spread at a gas station, Menards, or grocery store. Back to jericoloninja's comment above I came across this: https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-recovered-coronavirus-tried-donate-171000048.html Digesting the full article 1) it appears that most folks signing up for the trial have a high antibody count. 2) A lower antibody count does not mean she is not immune. 3) Just like with a vaccine some people do not always mount a full response to an actual disease. It's a small percentage, so generally not a big deal. Overall I don't really see anything in there that would make it seem that there will be issues with people developing immunity. Rapid enough mutation is still a possibility, though at that point Natural Selection will tend to drive the virus to longer latency and less serious complications. There are enough unknowns though that the extent of those shifts would be pretty hard to estimate in the short term.

It looks pretty detailed, but in a format that requires some work to understand and more work after that to process it.

While I'm optimistic on plasma, until the studies finish its hard to say. I would like to think that since Mayo is running the study they have the right expertise to have designed something fairly conclusive (as opposed to some of these smaller pilot type studies) that could still be wrapped up relatively soon. I do not have any direct experience with clinical trials, so there maybe some bottlenecks I'm unfamiliar with.

The article I had seen indicated that only 8 of the 19 were strongly linked to voting, the others were identified as having had other potential risky contacts.

Where are you seeing reports that people won't have immunity? It's not impossible, but is incredibly rare. In Aids it happens because the virus specifically targets cells of the immune system that rely on antibodies to work. To my knowledge their is no evidence of the virus specifically going after white blood cells. People think it happens with colds, but there are so many different viruses responsible that immunity against that specific one doesn't help against completely different viruses. And flu, but there the issue is one of a very unusual genetic make-up that allows flu to evolve rapidly from year to year. I have not seen anything to suggest that covid fits into any of those categories though rapid enough mutation is a theoretical possibility.

I've seen a few places start to mention concerns over false positives and false negatives, which is going to be an issue if we move into a large scale phase. Especially with an antibody test there is a permanent tension between false positive and false negative. You can do somethings to improve both, but there is always a trade-off in error rates. For antibody testing I would assume they would prefer a higher false negative rate. Better for someone to think they can still catch it than the reverse. But when you are testing millions of people even small error rates really add up.

I have not read Range, but I have read the Sports Gene which was quite good. I'm very slowly working through my backlog of reading. I would also highly recommend Who We are and How We got Here by David Reich history meets genetics.

A much more interesting thing to think about is what we are learning about susceptibility of supply chains and what the systematic loss of manufacturing capacity means. Even internally the fact that half of our pork is processed at 1 plant in South Dakota suddenly makes us incredibly vulnerable. Obviously there is no significant business that keeps nearly 10 times their yearly inventory on hand just in case, but having the capability to pivot reasonably quickly, and not having overly concentrated areas of manufacturing and supply makes the system much more robust to all kinds of shocks not just pandemics. On the investing side its diversify assets. Biologically we actually see this as specialists and generalists. Typically in a stable environment the specialist out-competes the generalist. Specialist species however tend to go extinct much more rapidly (think Koala's and eucalyptus). That large latent manufacturing power was huge in WWII after all.

I'm guessing most folks don't pay close enough attention, but the PPE needs for an infectious disease are very different than most hospital care. How often when you have been in have all of the nurses treating you or the person your visiting had a mask, gloves, face shield, and the disposable gown over the scrubs? It's just not needed most of the time. One of the more common times is when a patient has C.Diff, there are 450,000 cases of that in a year. Because you have to treat anybody with the symptoms that way, you can look at the number of tested individuals and get an idea for the demand. We are just under 4 million tested. Without even adjusting for 2 months versus an entire year that's like 9 times the normal demand. Planning for that level of just in case is quite rare in any walk of life.

County by county ends up making less sense when you realize your a pretty significant percentage of people regularly cross county boundaries for grocery runs and essential jobs. My in-laws have a 7 minute car trip one way to the grocery store in a different county, and a 15 minute trip the other direction in a 3rd county. As things get more spaced out in MN and WI you'll have all kinds of people wondering why they would have to travel halfway across the county, when this other town is so much closer. How about the Dells, it actually sits in 4 different counties. Marshfield sits in two. As for referring to the modelling as bad science? This is how it actually works all the time. It is not the magical answer producing in a few hours nonsense you see on TV or in the movies. Models are built, tested improved over and over again with cycles of critique and publication. The more potential variables the broader the range of outcomes ends up. So biological sciences (especially humans with all of that free will and changing behavior) tend to have wider confidence intervals then physical sciences. Most organisms take so long to grow you wouldn't be through even 1 experiment yet.

superfly the term your looking for is motivated reasoning. Which is why you have down played this from the beginning with now blatantly ridiculous predictions like 'this will just be a bad flu season'. Well the average number of flu deaths in the US over the last 9 years is just over 34,000. We crossed 40,000 over the weekend. That is in less than 2 months, the flu season is 6 months from October-March with very small numbers outside of those times. So this is problematic for the summer will save us notion given we are already well past the time when the seasonal benefits kick in. We also know that unlike the old flu numbers which are adjusted for systematic under counting our current totals for covid aren't. The highest total for a bad flu season is 61,000, which was the year the vaccine had such low effectiveness. So if you take under counted numbers in less than 2 months and multiply by 3. You end up with twice the deaths of a bad season even in the face of substantial mitigation. Perhaps more troubling there are now multiple outbreaks at food packaging/processing facilities under current conditions. Significant disruptions to food supply chains would be problematic to say the least.

We didn't have any problems lowering the benefit growth rate along with increasing contributions to improve the fund ratio. Calling it a ponzi scheme doesn't make any sense since it does not rely on ever increasing numbers of participants. It invests in the market just like individual. The reason it became easy to sell people against the idea is the dark side of compound interest. When you build your various budget forecasts extending 5,10 or 20+ years into the future any small amount of mismatch be revenue and costs will get magnified like it is compound interest, which turns into huge numbers pretty quickly. But forecasts are not destiny in the public sector anymore than they are in the private sector. You just have to manage the projection/ budget every year. I've sat through board meetings for well over a decade, and most of those years some new board member becomes convinced healthcare expenses are going to sink everything. At the end of the day though, with competitive bids and some other things we kept the impact close enough to inflation so that we've only had to increase employee contributions $25/ per check in that span.

Workforce age is not really relevant as pensions give you credit based on years worked, so swooping in at the end doesn't get you much. As I mentioned above a shrinking pool of workers does cause problems. Pension funds have an FDIC type insurance program, but solutions aren't hard to imagine since we have more workers than we did years ago, namely instead of tying pensions to jobs you could group pensions across worker classes and make sure things are staying stable. We know 401ks don't work as policy. They benefit some individuals, but after decades of telling people to save more it's clear that ain't working. If there wasn't so much money to be made in fees investment banks wouldn't try so hard to get a hold of the pensions. Aside from the rise of the 401k coinciding with rapid Wall Street growth my coworker who lived in NYC can vouch how eager they are to get their hands on the money. So I play the game a little bit to spread and hedge against what is really just a political risk. MN most recent actuarial study had to increase funding just a bit because people are living longer, I would guess that is the biggest driver of increases in most states.

Trying to extract maximum individual benefit is a short term gain though at best. If there is some sneaky hidden inefficiency, eventually it will show up in the actuarial studies and then you have to make adjustments to payouts and/ or contributions. I'm getting close enough that the various calculators give close enough results without having to completely sweat about how sensitive they are to assumptions. Between SSI and our pensions we are on pace for our retirement income to at worst match our working income. We effectively contribute 13% of our income to pensions. Once you account for not having to make SSI or Pension contributions in retirement we come out ahead. People work hard enough by and large they all deserve that.

401Ks do substantially worse. I'm not aware of any pension that isn't invested so it is earning a return. So I mentioned 1 huge advantage above, but there are 2 others that do it yourself will never top in a systematic way (so yes lucky individuals will occasionally out perform but not most). Reason number 2 is lower fees, than an individual can get. Reason 3 is that a pension never has to adopt the more conservative approach needed when you get older to manage risk. They can always participate in the market in a similar way. There are some cautions. 1) Rapidly changing the number of workers especially downward in a pension plan is problematic, this was a big one a few decades ago for the autoworkers. 2) Apparently in some states rules made it easy for lawmakers to raid the public pension fund. To my understanding this is not possible in MN or WI 3) I don't know how often private pensions are required to do the actuarial studies to adjust as people live longer or the inevitable variations in market returns.

Based on what I've seen in MN I'm guessing a big hurdle for 'elective' procedures is PPE. Initially it was a combination of prevent spread and trying to keep all hands on deck. I got rather excited by that antibody study, but between it being in California and a non-random sample I'm hesitant to get that excited that the actual infection rate is that much north of the previous estimate of 50% asymptomatic. We are just about to 0.5% of the population if you take the official count and double it, which isn't much but it wouldn't take a lot of bias in the study to push the apparent rate into the range they calculated.

The amount of money that wouldn't have to go to retirement under the 401K model if people didn't have to self insure against living too long is pretty staggering. It's one of the big reasons pensions are so much more efficient/ cheaper as an investment they can just assume the actuarial average. On the teaching side, the most recent data is that wealth is the biggest environmental variable on student performance yet most people need to start their families years before they hit peak earning, so it is a pretty common phenomena. The 2008 recession doubled our free/ reduced lunch population over night, including myself back then.

On the other hand getting backed into a corner policy wise might give Modern Monetary Theory a boost and give use some tools to get things moving faster going forward.

In other depressing news https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01011-6 Short version because of how other countries tend to run their vaccine programs a number of them are tailing off in the face of this epidemic and increasing the spread of measles. This increases the odds of causing problems in the US eventually because measles spreads at least 4 times better than Covid. I had mentioned some of this earlier, but various sub groups within the US do not have vaccine rates high enough to support herd immunity. Including parts of the upper midwest. While the fatality rate in the US is not large, it is large enough and it is known to have a high complication rate. These are potentially concerns for the normal immune compromised, too young to get the vaccine of course. The most random though is that 1-2% of people who are vaccinated never develop an actual immune response (this is common across vaccines).

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense Everyone gets that this is a huge drag and lots of people are getting hit hard, superfly. But your comments indicate you don't actually understand the scale of potential carnage. Particularly your earlier flippant 'a real threat would be 50% mortality' comment. Only the Black death has ever come somewhat close to that level of mortality and been widespread. On most historical population graphs it's also the only population decline recorded for humans. Think about that no wars ever managed to kill enough people to produce a net population decline. To try and put some perspective rather than pretending 90+% survival is good let's look at the American Civil War about 620,000 dead Americans out of 31 million. As stated before the natural R0 rate puts herd immunity at 2/3 of the population. The exact death rate remains to be seen, but if we go on the very low side at 1% that still gets us to 2.2 million after accounting for the disease sputtering out. If you scale up the Civil War present size that would be 6.2 million. A 2% death rates produces 4.4 million, and 3% surpasses in everyway. Undoubtedly you can come up clever sounding comebacks, but that completely misses the point. The fact that a reasonable estimate of not using our 1 tool that works right now to slow the spread gives final death tolls even remotely comparable to the war that killed more Americans by far than any other is horrific.