Opening with a quote from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo:

“We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work—that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case,” he said. “They’re not working, they’re not traveling, they’re predominantly downstate, predominantly minority, predominantly older.”

the editors of the Wall Street Journal continue with some pertinent observations:

More investigation is needed, but the virus may be spreading mostly within multigenerational households or public housing. Collecting more information about infected individuals’ habits would have been especially useful early in the pandemic before most businesses were shut down. This data could reveal patterns that suggest the most likely venues for transmission.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city will start collecting employment and demographic information as part of its antibody tests to pin down how the virus has spread. Mr. Cuomo this month released final results from a random antibody test of 15,000 people across the state, which raised some questions that need to be further investigated.

For instance, estimated infections are 10 percentage points higher in the Bronx than Manhattan, which is more dense. Latinos were also more than twice as likely to have antibodies than Asians. Low-income folks are more likely to work in jobs interfacing with customers, but other behavioral differences may account for their antibody disparities.

Surprisingly, millennials who are known to crowd bars and clubs were about as likely to carry antibodies as baby boomers. Even more curious, 12% of health-care workers tested positive for antibodies compared to 20% of the general population. This is good news since it suggests that the virus isn’t mainly being spread via the health-care system. Surveying more people through antibody and diagnostic tests could help experts better identify the major transmission vehicles.

Scientists often use such observational studies to identify risk factors for diseases when they can’t do randomized experiments. Regression analysis can help discern the variables that most influence an outcome while controlling for others. While studies can’t control for all confounding variables, they can still show important patterns.

Incorporating such surveys in random population tests could also let states reopen more safely. People could be asked how often each week they take mass transit, dine out, use a gym or visit a salon. Those who test positive could be compared to those who test negative, controlling for other factors.

This is of much more than merely academic interest. The measures that have been taken to slow the increase in COVID-19 cases including social distancing, “stay at home” directives, closing of public facilities like parks, and face mask directives, are all guesses. Sometimes they’re informed guesses; sometimes less so. It’s important to know whether sitting in a restaurant with other diners puts you at risk. It’s important to instill confidence in the public and it’s important to the restaurant—it may determine whether the enterprise remains viable. Theoretically, there may be a risk but in practice the risk may be so low as to be negligible. As Yogi Berra put it, in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is.

I think that Claire Jones’s paean to global supply chains in FT Alphaville:

Spare a thought for the global value chain. The complex web of relationships between the world’s makers has pushed down costs and opened up new markets – driving strong global growth and low inflation through the nineties and much of the noughties.

The backlash really began with the rise of populism, but these chains are facing a fresh wave of attacks following the outbreak of the coronavirus. The reason being that the focus on low-cost and just-in-time production has made our economies less robust, less able to weather shocks.

largely misses the point. I’m not arguing that every product that we consume should be manufactured in the United States from U. S.-made components or ingredients. I’m arguing that no conceivable economic benefit offsets the risks of relying on China for strategic goods like pharmaceuticals or personal protective equipment (PPE). You can understand why that is by reflecting on one, simple question: what happens when China goes offline, as was the case for several months?

Nothing in Ms. Jones’s piece addresses that. There’s also the issue of liability. As I have pointed out ad nauseam there is no such thing as a robust system of civil law. When a U. S. brand receives substandard merchandise or components from its offshore suppliers, there’s basically no recourse. U. S. consumers can sue the brand in a U. S. court but the brand will need to sue its supplier, if that remedy is available at all, in a court in which the supplier is at a decided advantage. “Well, we saved 10 cents on a $200 product” is cold comfort to someone who has been poisoned by adulterated drugs or infected with a serious infection due to faulty protective gear.

And let’s face it. No company actually does due diligence on their East Asian supply chains. The costs of doing so would outweigh the value of extending the supply chain that far. They just believe they can trust their suppliers. Under the circumstances the notion that we can just trust Chinese suppliers is laughable.

We have a vital, urgent need to shorten supply chains and make them more resilient. Don’t hold out the hope of manufacturing everything here. Yes, manufacture more here but also manufacture more in Canada, Mexico, and Central America where we can actually monitor what’s going on and exert a little more control.

I’ll try to summarize Scott Gottlieb’s latest Wall Street Journal op-ed:

1. The SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests we were getting from China were lousy.
2. Those from Quest and Abbott (“reputable companies”) are a lot better.
3. They still give false positives.
4. Using the results of passing antibody tests to allow or forbid certain actions (“antibody passports”) will never meet civil rights muster in the U. S.
5. Is there some way to “incorporate evidence of immunity into a person’s overall health”?

I’m less interested in that last than I am in getting some handle on the actual scope of the disease from place to place within the U. S. We still have no real notion of that.

I have not commented about the dropping of charges against former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn or about President Obama’s remarks about it and I plan to keep it that way. I honestly don’t know what to believe. Partisans of all stripes have strong opinions. I don’t know whether the Obama Administration, posssibly at the direction of President Obama himself, railroaded Gen. Flynn or whether AG Barr is engaging in a gross miscarriage of justice and I honestly don’t see how I can arrive at a conclusion other than on an a priori basis.

I’m not even going to bother quoting Robert Samuelson’s latest Washington Post column. Suffice it to say that he’s worried about the federal debt. I think there are good reasons to be worried but none that he lists. The Congress and the pundits on which so many Congressmen rely for their economic advice are mostly folk Keynesians. There are a few who are folk Modern Monetary Theorists.

A real Modern Monetary Theorist believes that a government that is a monetary sovereign can issue itself any amount of credit as long as that’s exceeded by the growth in aggregate product without fear of hyperinflation. A folk MMT-er believes monetary sovereign can issue itself any amount of credit full stop. A real Keynesian believes that a shortfall in aggregate demand by a well-timed and targeted stimulus using credit the monetary sovereign issues to itself. A folk Keynesian believes that all government spending produces economic growth.

What’s being right now is a matter of political if not economic survival. The federal government is “borrowing” (issuing credit to itself) to give money to consumers. That’s sort of like a payday loan. It will tide people over but it won’t necessarily produce economic growth. If it stimulates an economy it’s likely to be those of our trading partners.

That’s our immediate problem. The longer term problem is a shortfall in aggregate product. No Congressman now living has any experience in dealing with such a problem. Their immediate inclination will be to deal with the problem they know and understand using the tools they’re accustomed to using. We cannot solve that problem by spending more on health care or education. Those are consumption. Don’t be surprised at unexpected run-on effects.

Not only can they both be right but there doesn’t need to be just one Aristotelian choice. And it absolutely should not be a partisan shibboleth. In his piece at Atlantic Conor Friederdorf expresses my view pretty succinctly:

If we knew that a broadly effective COVID-19 treatment was imminent, or that a working vaccine was months away, minimizing infections through social distancing until that moment would be the right course. At the other extreme, if we will never have an effective treatment or vaccine and most everyone will get infected eventually, then the costs of social distancing are untenable. We don’t know where we sit on that spectrum. So we cannot know what the best way forward is even if we place the highest possible value on preserving life and protecting the vulnerable.

That uncertainty means, at the very least, that Americans should carefully consider the potential costs of prolonged shutdowns lest they cause more deaths or harm to the vulnerable than they spare.

Furthermore, it does not necessarily follow that simply because a lockdown may have been effective in stemming the spread of the virus somewhere it is necessarily effective anywhere. There are too many differences in the methods of implementation, the compliance of the people in any given area, and the circumstances to make a blanket statement.

I wonder when the Powers-That-Be will realize that the increasingly lengthy lockdowns will accelerate the period at which the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money and SSRI payments will be paid from the smaller revenues alone?

Understandably, the Social Security actuaries have passed on predicting what the effects of the lockdowns will be on the trust funds but without taking that into account the Social Security Retirement Trust Fund has enough money to pay the full promised amounts until 2034. That will certainly be hastened by so many people being out of work and that will be permanent. Even if the economy bounces back rapidly which increasingly looks as though it will not happen, the trust funds won’t.

I’m grateful to a regular commenter for drawing our attention to an article in Quillette by Jonathan Kay. Its initially compelling argument is driven by data provided by the company Moovit who eponymous app provides realtime information on transit much as Waze does for highway traffic. It is used by enough people that I believe it is a reasonable gauge of ridership. You can see Moovit’s data for yourself here.

What the data seem to show is that there have been sharp drop-offs in public transit ridership, the point of inflection in ridership in Seattle was on March 5, and in most other U. S. cities around March 10. These drop-offs precede lockdown order and so are not a consequence of them. Here’s the basic conclusion of the piece:

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this kind of data in recent weeks, and trying to tease out the policy ramifications. One of the trends that’s jumped out is that lockdown orders have tended to ratify public behaviour as much as prescribe or circumscribe it. Seattle residents essentially began imposing a lockdown on themselves before their government did, because the city had become one of the country’s leading early COVID-19 hotspots. Likewise, most Swedes didn’t need their government to tell them to stay home. Like everyone else, they get their news from the globalized data dump and anxiety mill known as social media. They all saw what was happening in Italy and elsewhere.

He also articulates something I’ve been saying here since early on in the crisis:

The skeptics who argue that lockdowns “don’t work” usually will support this claim by ticking off nations or regions that have succeeded in fighting off serious COVID-19 outbreaks without imposing harsh government restrictions. But when you parse the actual data, what you find is that these tend to be high-trust, high-education, high-information societies—such as in Scandinavia and East Asia—where official lockdowns haven’t been necessary precisely because a critical mass of people have effectively locked themselves down on their own.

but gets beyond the data here:

If spring-breakers in Miami were as conscientious and disciplined as, say, most office workers in Stockholm or Tokyo, the state’s governor wouldn’t have had to clear the beaches. But they’re not, so he did. Such spectacles tell us a lot about college students, but not much about lockdowns.

That has been analyzed. College students returning from spring break did not trigger an up-tick in new cases of COVID-19 as you might expect. Clearly, there’s more going on in the spread of the virus than simple proximity. That’s why I’ve kept harping on things like temperature and angle of the sun. As far as we know to date there has been no major outbreak of COVID-19 anywhere south of 23°N and that includes Brazil and the much-publicized Ecuador. Clearly, Ecuador’s health care system was already teetering on the brink and even a small increase in the number of cases requiring urgent care was enough to tip it over the edge. One might claim that you can’t trust the figures being released in Brazil or Ecuador but that cuts both ways. If the statistics from those places are phony, you ignore them rather than assuming the opposite and my claim remains true.

The author goes on to make this prudent observation:

The crowdsourced aspect of lockdowns is bad news and good news. It’s bad news because getting all of society’s actors on the same page will take many months. And so, as state-level data already show, we won’t be able to get our economies up and running on anything like the speedy timeline that most self-styled lockdown opponents are seeking. But it’s also good news, because a slower, crowdsourced form of lockdown lifting will be subject to a whole slew of negative feedback mechanisms among ordinary people and employers, such that localized outbreaks naturally lead to corrections. And so we can avoid the problem, depicted in Ferguson’s graphs, by which sudden quantum shifts in centralized policy yield behavioural spikes whose catastrophic effects set off an endless wave of epidemiological boom and bust.

but arrives at this dour conclusion:

Little of this self-imposed “lockdown-lite” is going to change in coming weeks and months, regardless of what government does, even as the masks come off and the floor dots start to fade. The changes we’ve made are sociologically sticky and, in some cases, literally hard-bolted into our public architecture.

I’m not so sure. I think that lockdown fatigue is starting to set in and, unless there is a significant surge in new cases, people are likely to relax over time.

I see no obvious straight line relationship between lockdowns and declines in COVID-19 cases. If there were, Illinois’s and Chicago’s experiences would be different than they have been. Proclaiming that they have not effective because Chicagoans aren’t compliant enough is just another way of saying that the measures as implemented are not effective. That’s one of the weaknesses of the piece. There were, in fact, precipitating events that prompted the decline in public transit ridership. The mayor of Seattle proclaimed a state of emergency on March 3 and the point of inflection in ridership took place on March 5. That can hardly have been a coincidence. I haven’t researched it but I suspect that Seattle major news outlets were deluged with reports about COVID-19 that moved people to lock themselves down.

Over the centuries cities and towns or even whole societies have found themselves in the grip of mass manias. There is a real disease that has real consequences and has resulted in real deaths.

In the United States half of all of the diagnosed cases and half of all of the deaths appear to have occurred in the New York metropolitan area. Outside the New York area the situation is different. In more than half of the states the prevalence of the disease is around 1 in a thousand and the morbidity is on the order of 1 in a 100,000.

I don’t know what the right policy is and, more importantly, I don’t even know if there is a right policy. I agree with the basic message of the linked article: the people’s behavior will tell us what the policy will be.

On my much-reduced in number trips to the grocery store I always take note of the status of the paper products and cleaning supplies aisles. Toilet paper, paper towels, and facial tissue remain in short supply as do bleach, disinfectant, and hand sanitizer. The explanations that have been proffered for these shortages include panic-buying, hoarding by profiteers, and a transition from the use of these products divided between places of work and home to at home only.

I think that last explanation is largely balderdash. For one thing most places of business in the U. S. don’t rely on commercial sources for TP; they buy the same products from the same places as home shoppers do.

The products I do see on the shelves are mostly off brands I’ve never heard of before.

I suspect that supply chain disruption is a major component of the shortages. Protestations of manufacturers to the contrary notwithstanding I believe that even the supply chain for the ingredients used in humble TP is very long indeed with wood pulp coming from Brazil, the components of bleach and scents and softening agents coming from China inter alia.