Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Here’s an article with data…or at least assertions…about various ways in which Covid-19 spreads and their relative risks.
To the extent that data at this level of detail can be obtained and verified, it seems a lot more useful than generic claims about lockdowns and social distancing, or the elimination of same.
Mike K, any comments?
Robert Prost follows up his previous email (posted here):
Plotted below are the covid-19 confirmed cases for Wisconsin. The data is graphed so that the first derivative plot is scaled up for better visibility. The fact that the graph has been jumping so erratically means that somebody is manipulating the data. This first derivative is the rate of change of the accumulation of new cases. That fact that it jumps around means that either someone is pushing the hospitals to change their definition of ‘confirmation’ or the virus has a mind of its own. If the changes were due to the sudden availability of additional testing, the increase should be all in one direction if additional cases were being detected. Someone is playing games in pursuit of a political agenda. Were I to hazard a guess, I’d say it is due to our addled governor, aka Tony Baloney.
Robert concludes: “This data certainly does not give a good reason to extend the lockdown.”
There are lots of hopeful reports — despite the USA COVID-19 infections being over 1/2 million and the total deaths of over 20,000 people — that the pandemic will soon be “Over.”
This is fantasy thinking at best. SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 won’t be over, until it is over, for YEARS.
“Over” being defined as world wide mass vaccinations to the tune of 70% of humanity or human herd immunity. Assuming such a thing is possible, which it may not be, given this recent report from the UK Daily Mail on post SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 infection immunity —
Blow to Britain’s hopes for coronavirus antibody testing as study finds a THIRD of recovered patients have barely-detectable evidence they have had the virus already
.
– Nearly third of patients have very low levels of antibodies, Chinese study found
– Antibodies not detected at all in 10 people, raising fears they could be reinfected
– Explains why UK Government repeatedly delayed rolling them out to the public.
.
Related studies:
Wu F et al. Neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in a COVID-19 recovered patient cohort and their implications. medRxiv 2020.03.30.20047365; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047365.
and
.
Zhao J et al. Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in patients of novel coronavirus disease 2019, Clinical Infectious Diseases, , ciaa344, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa344
total by July 1st 51,197
Or this South Korean story on coronavirus “reactivation” —
South Korea reports recovered coronavirus patients testing positive again
APRIL 10, 2020
Josh Smith, Sangmi Cha.
The issue with most COVID-19 tests, like the ones mentioned in South Korea, is they detect SARS-CoV2 RNA. They do not detect whether the viral particles are active or not. The issue here is whether these people are shedding active viral particles that can re-infect people. We don’t know if that is the case here from the story text. Given how infectious it is. This coronavirus will tell us in due course.
There are some viral diseases like Herpes that hide inside your body and reactivate to make you infectious. We do not know enough about the SARs-CoV2 virus to say whether that is the case here.
If the SARS-CoV2 virus is like Herpes in that once contracted, it never goes away and flares infectious several times a year.
And there is no herd immunity for some people no matter how often they are infected.
Then we will need multiple, cheap, out-patient style “cure-treatments” as well as multiple vaccines, based on co-morbidities, and possibly to account for racial differences like sickle cell blood mutations, as SARS-CoV2 may well be more a blood disease than a respiratory infection in terms of it’s killing mechanism.
See:
COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism
There is not enough reliable data, d*mn it!
Until we get to “Over,” our old economic world of Just-In-Time, Sole Source anywhere, but especially in China, is dead without replacement.
The world is in the same position as Germany was from August 1944 – April 1945 or Japan from August 1944 until August 1945 versus the Allied strategic bombing campaign. We have entered the world of “End Run Production“ as world wide supply chains grind to a halt from various fiddly bits of intermediate parts running out without replacement. The on-and-off hotspots world wide of COVID-19 at different times and places in the world economy is no different than WW2 strategic bombing in terms of causing random damage to the economic life support.
See also “End Run Production” here from this one volume WW2 history book The Great Crusade:
Be it automobiles, self propelled construction equipment, jets, power plants or the latest electronic gadget, anything that has thousands of parts sourced world wide with lots of Chinese cheap/disposable sub-component content anywhere in the supply chain simply won’t be produced for the next 18 months to three years.
This “random damage to the economic life support” effect is amplified by the unwillingness of Western private industry to invest in building the capitol equipment to produced those intermediate parts. Because of the threat of China coming back with predatory pricing — using bought politicians to cover for them — means those parts won’t be built without massive cost plus contract government buy out of the investment risk like happened in the USA in the 1942 WW2 mobilization.
The story of one American n95 mask manufacturer’s experience with the Obama Administration in 2009 with the Swine flu is a case in point. The n95 mask is a 50 cent item where China pays 2 cents a mask for labor versus 10 cents a mask for American labor. When the American manufacturer geared up to replace Chinese mask production. China came back on-line and the Obama Administration refused to keep buying the American mask producer’s 8 cents more expensive mask when the Chinese masks were available.
Unlike almost 80 years ago, current Western and particularly American politicians are too corrupt to go too massive cost plus contract government buy out this private investment risk. Mainly because these political elites can’t be bothered to figure out their 10% cut. Instead we are getting more “fiscal stimulus” AKA boondoggles that the elites will saddle the rest of us with high interest payments on huge public debts.
It will take local small to mid-sized business to get the American economy going during the COVID-19 pandemic via making products and services that don’t use the intermediate products China threatens with when the pandemic ends.
My read on what comes next economically is local/distributed production with limited capitol investment that is multi-product capable. The name for that is additive manufacturing, AKA 3D Printing. Here are a couple of examples:
voxeljet enters alliance to industrialize core tooling production using 3D printing
.
But, like developing SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 vaccines, this new locally distributed manufacturing economy will take time. The possible opening of the American economy in May 2020 will not bring the old economy of December 2019 back.
.
That economy is dead. It cannot, will not, come back.
.
We will have to dance with both the sickness from SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 and the widening “End Run Production“ product shortages that the death of the globalist just-in-time, sole source in China economic model causes for years.
.
And this is a hard reality, not a fantasy, we must all face.
Robert Prost emails:
I wanted to share with you, my take on the corona virus situation in the United States.
But first, a brief introduction. I am professor emeritus at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
I have a PhD in Biophysics and spent my career in MRI-based research, mostly on brain tumors.
I check the Johns Hopkins’ website every day for the progress of the epidemic and I had a feeling about the numbers I’ve been seeing.
The website: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 is very good.
The daily case number totals can be extracted by mousing over each plotted point in the graph in the lower right hand corner of the screen.
The curve at first looks daunting, it seems to be shooting straight up. But being at least in part a mathematician, I wondered about the velocity of this upward move in cases.
If the velocity was going up, the epidemic would be accelerating, the epidemic would be worsening. If going down, it would be getting better (slowing).
So I plotted the data and took the first derivative with respect to time. What it shows is that the velocity of the epidemic in the US is definitely slowing, and quickly.
While the number of confirmed cases continues to rise, it is rising more slowly. If there were a confounding effect from increased surveillance (more testing revealing yet more cases), the apparent velocity should be going up.
Instead, it is going down. So I believe the effect to be real, and thus I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the epidemic. While this data says nothing about the potential for re-emergence in the fall or following spring, it does suggest that we have in fact, flattened the curve.
UPDATE: A follow-up email from Robert is posted here.
Before there were electronic digital computers, there were mechanical analog computers. Although now obsolete for practical computation, these devices might actually have an useful future ahead of them–in education.
Mechanical analog computation (analog means that calculation is done by measuring rather than by counting) goes back to the Greek Antikythera mechanism (65 BC), which was used to predict the positions of heavenly bodies. The modern era of analog computing began with the work done by James Thompson and his brother William (Lord Kelvin) in the 1870s. First, James Thompson created a mechanical device that performs the calculus function of integration.
Lord Kelvin applied this device…along with other mechanisms for addition and trigonometric functions…to create a mechanical tide-prediction system. These tide predictors had a pretty good run: the invention was announced in 1876, and some of these systems were still in use in the early 1970s!
For those who haven’t studied calculus, integration can be thought of as a kind of continuous addition. Imagine a hose with a fluctuating flow rate filling a pool: by integrating the rate of flow, you can calculate the volume of water added to the pool.
The basic concept of a mechanical integrator is shown below.
If the vertical shaft is turned at a constant rate, and the small wheel is moved in and out according to the changing value of some some variable Y, then the rotation of the horizontal shaft Z will represent the integral of Y with respect to time. If Y is the rate of flow of the a hose, Z will be the total volume added to the pool. If Y represents the acceleration of a vehicle, then the output shaft will give that vehicle’s speed at any moment. Connect the output to the input of another integrator, and you will get the distance traveled.
Vannevar Bush, who would become Roosevelt’s science adviser during WWII, combined the integrator and other computing mechanisms to create a highly general mechanical computer, called a differential analyzer. Completed in 1931, it was not restricted to a single application, but could be programmed–with a wrench and screwdriver to alter the connections–for a wide range of problems. Complex chains of calculation were possible, including the ability for a result at one stage to be fed back as input at an earlier stage–for example, the speed of a simulated vehicle affects its air resistance, which in turn influences its acceleration…which integrates back to its speed.
Other differential analyzers were built in the U.S., Norway, and Britain, and were used for applications including heat-flow analysis, electrical network stability analysis, soil-erosion studies, artillery firing table preparation, and studies of the loading and deflection of beams. It is rumored that a British analyzer was used in the planning for the bouncing-bomb attack on German hydroelectric dams during WWII. Differential analyzers appeared in several movies, including the 1951 film When Worlds Collide (video clip). The ultimate in mechanical analog computation was the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer, a rather baroque (and very expensive) machine built in 1942. It was decommissioned in 1954, on the belief that the future of calculation would belong to the electronic computer, and especially the electronic digital computer. Following the decommissioning, the mathematician Warren Weaver wrote:
It seems rather a pity not to have around such a place as MIT a really impressive Analogue computer; for there is vividness and directness of meaning of the electrical and mechanical processes involved… which can hardly fail, I would think, to have a very considerable educational value. A Digital Electronic computer is bound to be a somewhat abstract affair, in which the actual computational processes are fairly deeply submerged.