In a piece at Bloomberg, Mohammed El-Erian provides what is, to some extent, the opposing view to Mr. Shriver’s presented above. He opens with an analysis from Eric Schmidt:
Schmidt sees populations evolving into three broad segments over the short term: people who are willing to engage, believing they don’t have the virus; those who don’t have it but are reluctant to engage due to personal risk aversion or other considerations; and those who shouldn’t and aren’t engaging because they either know they have the virus or are highly vulnerable due to pre-existing conditions and age. Governments and businesses, as both employers and suppliers, will need to adapt to these groups.
Linking his concepts to a system that’s fundamentally wired for intense human interaction and mobility gives us greater clarity on the shape of outcomes for public health and the macro-economy – that is, lives and livelihoods. These will be underpinned by households and businesses making a micro-set of information and risk-taking calculations, combined with self-identification and signaling.
Testing, tracing and vaccines will be crucial. Without them, there would be considerable mistrust, high risk aversion and low engagement. No trustworthy way exists to entice a sufficiently large number of genuinely healthy people to re-engage in the economy. Internal and external mobility will remain disrupted. The much-expected and hoped-for economic rebound would be weak and inherently vulnerable. More of an L and U/W than a sharp V.
Oddly, for an investment guru, he completely ignores the notion of risk. In the New York City metropolitan area, based on the present statistics, there’s about a 1 in 70 chance that you’ll contract the disease and a 1 in 700 that it will kill you but that overstates the risks since fully half of those who have died have been in nursing homes or other care facilities. In the State of Florida (roughly the same population as the NYC metropolitan area with a much older median age), there’s about a 1 in 7,000 chance you’ll get the disease and 1 in 10,000 chance it will kill you. It stands to reason that the views of risk would vary drastically between the two places. However, since our opinion-making apparatus is very heavily concentrated in the NYC metro area, the perception of risk being portrayed in the media is much more applicable to NYC than it is to Florida. And, as I’ve pointed out in the past, in almost half the states the risks are actually less than in Florida.
And all of that assumes that the risk for any given individual is the same and we don’t even know that.
On the subject of individual risk; this week scientists from California published a paper that which is very insightful.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3
The summary is they found two things:
1. The immune system produces a vigorous response to infection, at multiple layers.
2. 40-60% of never-infected people have some “cross-immunity” to the virus, likely from previous infections of other types of coronavirus that cause the common cold. This is a consistent finding with SARs; so I think the finding is real.
It is the second point that is key. How strong is the “cross immunity” — is that the difference between a cold vs hospitalization? Could we test for that?
I find Dave’s comments here much, much closer to reality than hypertechnical musing or parsing of words in the previous thread. Outside of NY metro, DC, Boston and Chicago they hardly know what to make of this insanity.
A serious majority in FL, GA and SC think this is absurd. (And they aren’t dropping like flies in GA now that it’s opened). I can’t imagine it is different in Wyoming or AZ. It just goes to show that the focused strategy I’ve been harping on was better all along. Almost no model or prediction by the “experts†has been within a country mile of the actual experience.
As I’ve said. It’s been so boneheaded a response that something is wrong here.
What is remarkable is that the experts predictions have been pretty accurate, if you actually read them. This was a new disease and little was known about it when making the models and predictions. if you just accept whatever some journalist with a POV said about the studies, then I can see people being upset. We are still in the early part of this outbreak. We have a lot more to learn. It may be that population density or temperature are more important then was known when earl decisions were made. We will find out.
Steve