There is an interesting article about seasonality in diseases at Science by Jon Cohen. It’s a fairly lengthy, wide-ranging treatment of the subject. Here’s a snippet:

Will SARS-CoV-2, which has an envelope, prove fragile in spring and summer, when absolute and relative humidity climb? The most notorious of the other coronavirus diseases, SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), offer no clues. SARS emerged in late 2002 and was driven out of the human population in the summer of 2003 through intensive containment efforts. MERS sporadically jumps from camels to humans and has caused outbreaks in hospitals, but never widespread human-to-human transmission like COVID-19. Neither virus circulated for long enough, on a wide enough scale, for any seasonal cycle to emerge.

Four human coronaviruses that cause colds and other respiratory diseases are more revealing. Three have “marked winter seasonality,” with few or no detections in the summer, molecular biologist Kate Templeton, also at the University of Edinburgh, concluded in a 2010 analysis of 11,661 respiratory samples collected between 2006 and 2009. These three viruses essentially behave like the flu.

That does not mean COVID-19 will as well. The virus can clearly transmit in warm, humid climates: Singapore has more than 175 cases. Two new papers published on preprint servers this week come to opposite conclusions. One, co-authored by Lipsitch, looked at COVID-19 spread in 19 provinces across China, which ranged from cold and dry to tropical, and found sustained transmission everywhere. The second study concludes that sustained transmission appears to occur only in specific bands of the globe that have temperatures between 5°C and 11°C and 47% to 70% relative humidity.

Obviously, we don’t really have enough information yet to make any confident generalization but what we presently have in hand isn’t particularly favorable. There have been substantial outbreaks in places with high temperatures (Singapore) and low (South Korea), high humidity (Singapore) and low (Qatar), and all combinations and places in between.

When Gov. Pritzker proclaimed a ban on assemblies of 1,000 people or more and ordered that all schools be closed, my immediate reaction was to wonder what gave him that authority? There is nothing in the Illinois Constitution granting the governor that authority but an expansive reading of Illinois law (20 ILCS 3305/7) does. Following a declaration of emergency (which he had previously done):

(4) On behalf of this State to take possession of,

and to acquire full title or a lesser specified interest in, any personal property as may be necessary to accomplish the objectives set forth in Section 2 of this Act, including: airplanes, automobiles, trucks, trailers, buses, and other vehicles; coal, oils, gasoline, and other fuels and means of propulsion; explosives, materials, equipment, and supplies; animals and livestock; feed and seed; food and provisions for humans and animals; clothing and bedding; and medicines and medical and surgical supplies; and to take possession of and for a limited period occupy and use any real estate necessary to accomplish those objectives; but only upon the undertaking by the State to pay just compensation therefor as in this Act provided, and then only under the following provisions…

I had no doubt that the governor had the authority to close the Chicago Public Schools, for example, but I think that ordering private schools closed is a different story.

I would appreciate knowing of any other statutes, case law, or the common law providing the governor with the powers he’s exercising.

As I’ve noted before I think these are bold moves by a state that can’t pay its bills as it is and is teetering on the brink of being unable to borrow.

When I bring up details like this there are those who chide me that this is an emergency and you can’t think of stuff like this in an emergency. I think in an emergency is precisely when you should think about things like this and that Illinois is opening an enormous can of worms, the effects of which will be felt for years to come.

These are the times that try men’s souls.

I found this op-ed by Benjamin J. Cowling and Wey Wen Lim at the New York Times, recounting the measures that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have taken in response to COVID-19 interesting:

But lockdowns and forced quarantines on this scale or the nature of some methods — like the collection of mobile phone location data and facial recognition technology to track people’s movements — cannot readily be replicated in other countries, especially democratic ones with institutional protections for individual rights.

And so Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong might be more instructive examples. All three places were especially vulnerable to the spread of the infection because of close links with mainland China — especially in early January, as they were prime destinations for Chinese travelers during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday. And yet, after all three experienced outbreaks of their own, the situation seems to have stabilized.

As of midday Friday, Singapore had 187 cases confirmed and no deaths (for a total population of about 5.7 million), Taiwan had 50 confirmed cases including 1 death (for a total population of about 23.6 million) and Hong Kong had 131 confirmed cases including 4 deaths (for a total population of about 7.5 million).

Since identifying the first infections (all imported) on their territories — on Jan. 21 in Taiwan and on Jan. 23 in both Hong Kong and Singapore — all three governments have implemented some combination of measures to (1) reduce the arrival of new cases into the community (travel restrictions), (2) specifically prevent possible transmission between known cases and the local population (quarantines) and (3) generally suppress silent transmission in the community by reducing contact between individuals (self-isolation, social distancing, heightened hygiene). But each has had a different approach.

While I found this analysis interesting, I don’t think that there is much for us to learn from the experience of Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They are all primarily ethnic Chinese, culturally have Confucian roots, have histories (or presents) of authoritarianism, and are, by our standards, very small. Not only are Singapore and Taiwan small, they are islands.

Rather than preaching to us to adopt Taiwanese virtues, we are going to need to encourage and bolster our own traditional virtues however much that might horrify coastal elites if we are to arrive at an effective response of our own.

The most recent editorial from the editors of the Washington Post is, I think, well-intentioned. In it they declaim that our response to the COVID-19 outbreak illustates “America at its best”:

AMID DREAD and uncertainty, the American people are displaying extraordinary purpose and motivation to meet the coronavirus threat head-on. From darkening Broadway to silencing professional and amateur sports leagues, from closing Disneyland to shuttering cathedrals, we are witnessing the response of an open democratic society, with unfettered news and social media, and civic and political institutions and leadership ready to make hard decisions. This is America at its best.

Ever since experts began calling for social distancing to reduce transmission of the respiratory virus, people in the United States have demonstrated they were listening. Their actions have ranged from small acts of kindness, such as a young woman buying groceries for an elderly couple, to disruptive decisions that until recently would have seemed unthinkable, such as emptying sports stadiums and turning out the lights at universities. Costly, emotionally fraught choices have engendered remarkably little complaining or bitterness.

but I think the editorial is a confused jumble. Broadway wasn’t “darkened” by the American people or even by the public-spiritedness of the theater operators. The governor of the state declared a state of emergency and a ban on assemblies of 500 people or more. That’s what closed the theater and “silenced” professional and amateur sports leagues. “Shuttering cathedrals” was an act of the bishop, another authoritarian. There was nothing democratic or particularly American about it. The Soviet Union might have done the same.

And have they never read The Pursuit of Loneliness? It’s now in its 50^th year. Americans hardly need to be told to isolate themselves. It has become a national malady. It’s like telling one of Garrison Keillor’s “Norwegian bachelor farmers” the virtues of remaining silent. We are now actively promoting a pre-existing trend.

The act of individual, personal philanthropy to which they point is, indeed, “America at its best” much as it was first described 195 years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. I would say that our strengths as a country include

• Our ability to self-organize
• Personal responsibility and kindness
• Initiative
• Entrepeneurship

all of which are embattled these days. I would also say that so far our response to the outbreak has shown us both at our best and our worst. Consider, for example, the case of the two enterprising brothers in Tennessee reported on by the New York Times who, as soon as the first fatality due to COVID-19 occurred, industriously went around buying all of the hand sanitizer and sanitary wipes they could put their hands on and started selling them on Amazon. Until Amazon shut them down. You may recall that earlier I claimed that many of the shelves empty of bleach, wipes, sanitizer, etc. were due to profiteers. That’s at least a little evidence of my claim. Or this article from the Toronto Star about the couple who’ve made $100,000 reselling Lysol wipes. A few hundred or thousand people like that can create a panic which I think is what we’re already seeing.

Well, we have an answer to the question posed below—what should the Chicago Public Schools do? The decision has been taken out of the CPS CEO’s and the mayor’s hands. Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker has directed all schools in Illinois to remain closed until March 30. CBS Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (CBS) — As concerns over the spread of the coronavirus continue to mount, Gov. JB Pritzker said Friday he is ordering all public and private schools in Illinois to close for nearly two weeks, starting Tuesday.

“This is the right thing to do to protect our students, and their teachers, and school workers, and parents,” he said at a press conference Friday afternoon at the Thompson Center.

Pritzker said schools would be open on Monday so teachers could distribute remote learning lesson plans to students. The governor said, for now, schools are expected to reopen on March 30.

“We will close all K-12 schools, public and private, statewide,” Pritzker said. “I understand the gravity of this action and what it means for every community in our state.”

The governor also stressed no school district would see its state funding cut as a result of his order to close. He also said the Illinois State Board of Education was working with schools and food banks to deliver two meals a day to the families of students who qualify for free school lunch.

Pritzker’s announcement came just hours after Mayor Lori Lightfoot had said she was not yet ready to close the Chicago Public Schools, and the governor was not pressuring her to do so.

I find his directive to “deliver two meals a day to the the families of students who qualify for free school lunch” interesting. The National School Lunch Program is a federal program. I seriously doubt that home delivery is presently included in its provisions and I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t take some scrambling by the Congress to make sure that those lunches qualify. My point is not that I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. I do. But there are differences among what’s right, what’s legal, and what’s practical. Especially for a state with the worst credit rating in the nation and that already can’t pay its bills.

Phillip W. Magness and Stephen C. Miller report on new data from the Internal Revenue Service on effective tax rates in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The new IRS numbers now provide reason to doubt Messrs. Saez and Zucman’s entire narrative of a regressive U.S. tax system designed to favor the rich at the expense of the poor. The IRS reports effective income-tax rates on the adjusted gross incomes of different groups of earners. That’s the percentage of income that people actually pay to the government, as distinct from the statutory tax rate.

According to the IRS, the top 0.01% of earners—those with incomes above $10 million—paid a 24.8% effective federal income-tax rate in 2018. This isn’t very different from the 25.3% the group paid in 2017, and is higher than the average rate of 22.5% on the same group during the George W. Bush administration. As these rates only encompass federal income taxes, most filers can expect to add another 8% to 12% of income from other forms of taxation, placing their total burden well above the Saez-Zucman numbers.

How does that affect the claims of regressivity? It’s true the remainder of the top 1% (those with incomes between roughly $500,000 and $10 million) paid a slightly higher effective rate, at 26.5%, than the top 0.01% did. But tax rates drop rapidly from there, with filers in the $50,000 to $75,000 reporting bracket (approximately the median U.S. family income) facing an average federal income-tax rate of 8.4%.

People who earned between $15,000 and $40,000 paid an average federal rate of merely 4% of their adjusted gross incomes in 2018. And thanks to the earned-income tax credit and others like it, the poorest earners paid very little if any federal income tax at all.

In short, the federal income-tax structure still places the unambiguous bulk of its burden on the highest earners. The Trump tax cut hasn’t changed that. In 2018, the top 1% of U.S. earners paid roughly 37% of all federal income taxes. The top 5% paid around 58%.

I think the complaints about the rich not “paying their fair share” is more like the reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks—it’s where the money is—than any sense of fairness or just. The reality remains that if you want to greatly increase the amount of federal spending for any reason whatever you’re either going to just “print more money” i.e. issue ourselves more credit, borrow, or tax the two top quintiles of income earners, i.e. taxing everybody earning incomes over $78,000 more. There are a lot of public employees, physicians, and lawyers in that group. Chicago public school teachers earn a median income over $80,000/year. Chicago cops and firefighters have a median income (including overtime) into six figures.

But what makes our federal tax system less progressive than it otherwise would be isn’t that folks with seven figure income don’t pay high enough effective tax rates. It’s the payroll tax.

In his Washington Post column Fareed Zakharia chides the United States for its ineffective response to COVID-19:

We can track the speed of the outbreak since January, by which time the virus had spread from China to other countries. In South Korea, after an initial spike, the number of new cases has slowed. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan — despite lots of travelers from China — have kept numbers low from the beginning. In the United States, however, we are seeing accelerating increases.

What did the successful countries do that seems to have worked? They began testing early and often. They coupled these tests with careful quarantines of those infected and tracking of where they had been, to better predict where the next outbreaks might occur. The public health systems had surge capacity because funding had been adequate. And authorities largely communicated simple, clear and consistent messages to the public.

I honestly have no idea what he’s talking about. The number of cases per million population in South Korea is 155.6. The number of cases per million in the U. S. is 5.7. If we had been as successful as South Korea, more than 30,000 Americans would have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and 150 people would have died. That’s about four times as many as have actually died. The situation is only a little better in Singapore and Hong Kong. They are not success stories except, possibly, in one metric which is the number of new cases diagnosed.

I repeat what I’ve written at least twice already today. In NO country has the number of cases stopped increasing. I agree that we should determine why the number of cases in South Korea isn’t growing as fast as here. Maybe it’s testing. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t honestly know.

IMO the real example we should consider is Taiwan. Why is the number of diagnosed case per million population so low there?

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle presents the reasons she’s optimistic about the U. S. response to COVID-19:

Our first advantage lies in our health-care system. Yes, you read that right. The United States has gaps in its coverage that other countries don’t have — and I have repeatedly urged Congress and the president to close those gaps for the duration of this emergency. We also don’t have universal mandatory paid sick leave, which means that some workers will be tempted to work while sick.

But, in fact, these aren’t the gaps we most need to worry about; the government can (and should) pass emergency measures to provide paid sick leave, and to pay for coronavirus treatment as well as testing — as well, of course, as working with laboratories and regulators to ramp up our testing capability. That’s an easy problem compared to what Italy is dealing with now: more critical patients than they have ICU beds. Ventilators and trained critical-care staff can’t be mobilized as fast as government funds.

Fortunately, the United States already has a lot of ICU beds relative to its population. Our hospitals love to develop their expensive, intensive capabilities, and we’ve no central regulator who can stop them. Normally, this may be an expensive waste of resources, but right now, it could save a lot of lives.

The United States also has private-lab capacity waiting to be mobilized. And that’s vital, at a time when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have been tripping over their own feet, as former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb pointed out on Twitter Thursday morning. We are lucky to have a robust private market which can, in cooperation with regulators, scale up to help us identify and isolate carriers, rather than a potential single point of failure.

Finally, Americans have a penchant for self-isolation. This starts at with our individual physical space; we just prefer to stand further from each other than people in many other countries. We don’t like to kiss or hug anyone except close friends and family. Our harassment laws make us leery of touching co-workers.

I wonder if she understands how presumably unintentionally funny that is. Let me restate it. Compared with other countries we’re already behaving as though there were a crisis and we’ve been behaving as though we were self-quarantining for years.

Once again, I don’t think we know enough to ascertain whether we have advantages over other countries in coping with COVID-19, disadvantages, or both. I think our greatest advantage is that we have numerically more medical researchers than anywhere else in the world and, as Samuel Johnson put it, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”.

I am presently working from home. My employer sent out an email night before last authorizing anyone who so desired to work from home so that’s what I’m doing. I’m way over 60 so I guess I’m among the most vulnerable group. I’m in very good health, generally. There’s nothing wrong with me that hasn’t been wrong for 20 years or more. I have a strong immune system—I rarely get sick.

I’m not particularly nervous. What will be will be. But I am washing my hands a lot more and am now curtailing travel.

One thing I wanted to pass along is that employers in India, at least in the big cities, are taking precautions similar to those being taken by employers here. I suspect that in due course we’ll learn that India has had quite a few cases of COVID-19 but as of now they haven’t reported many. Maybe it’s the heat.