And piling onto the bad news for forecasters comes this tidbit from Minnesota Public Radio:

The pace of Minnesota’s COVID-19 outbreak has slowed significantly in recent weeks — though thousands remain sick and there’s no guarantee the situation will continue to improve.

On Sunday, Minnesota reported 311 new cases and 15 new deaths from COVID-19; the net increase in cases from Saturday was 299, as the state received more information and updated previous days’ data.

Over the past week, the state has averaged less than 400 new cases per day — still a lot, but far less than the 700 daily cases the state was seeing in late May. And this decline in new cases has happened even as the state tests more people for the disease: an average of more than 10,000 per day, up from about 7,500 per day in late May.

and, importantly, the decline has continued despite the mass demonstrations over the last several weeks in Minneapolis. Note that it doesn’t say what the decline would have been without the protests or whether the protests have made no difference in the number of cases. But it’s another case in which predictions of disaster have not been borne out by events.

Some evidence is emerging for something that there’s been speculation about. From Reuters:

(Reuters) – A specific mutation in the new coronavirus can significantly increase its ability to infect cells, according to a study by U.S. researchers.

The research may explain why early outbreaks in some parts of the world did not end up overwhelming health systems as much as other outbreaks in New York and Italy, according to experts at Scripps Research.

The mutation, named D614G, increased the number of “spikes” on the coronavirus – which is the part that gives it its distinctive shape. Those spikes are what allow the virus to bind to and infect cells.

At this point that doesn’t say anything about virulence, just contagion. Note that if true it would also throw a bit of cold water on the claims that whether what various countries have done has been effective in reducing the spread of the disease. Not only may they have been dealing with different variants of the disease, they may still have yet to face those variants. We just don’t know.

Offhand I’m going to venture a guess that John P.A. Ioannidis, Sally Cripps, and Martin A. Tanner will make very few friends, particularly among policymakers, with their critique of forecasting models for COVID-19, published at the site of the International Institute of Forecasters. Here’s their conclusion:

Blindly acting based on extreme value theory alone would be sensible if we lived in the times of the Antonine plague or even in 1890, with no science to identify the pathogen, elucidate its true prevalence, estimate accurately its lethality, and carry out good epidemiology to identify which people and settings are at risk. Until we accrue this information, immediate better-safe-than-sorry responses are legitimate, trusting extreme forecasts as possible (not necessarily likely) scenarios. However, caveats of these forecasts should not be ignored [1,18] and new evidence on the ground truth needs continuous reassessment. Upon acquiring solid evidence about the epidemiological features of new outbreaks, implausible, exaggerated forecasts [19] should be abandoned. Otherwise, they may cause more harm than the virus itself.

I see some problems with that statement not the least of which is that we don’t know for sure even more than three months after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic that we’re not living, effectively, “in the times of the Antonine plague or even in 1890”. We don’t have a cure; we don’t have a vaccine; we don’t even have really effective treatments; we don’t know whether the ability to identify the virus will lead to any of those things; we haven’t carried out “good epidemiology to identify which people and settings are at risk”. That last is something I have been encouraging for months. A key problem is that the ethical obligations of physicians, prime among which is to care for their patients, can be in conflict with the welfare of the population as a whole.

I found this passage particularly gratifying:

Many models assume homogeneity, i.e. all people having equal chances of mixing with each other and infecting each other. This is an untenable assumption and in reality, tremendous heterogeneity of exposures and mixing is likely to be the norm. Unless this heterogeneity is recognized, estimated of the proportion of people eventually infected before reaching herd immunity can be markedly inflated

since that is a point I have been hammering for months.

I think another basic problem is that science just doesn’t work the way people want it to and, particularly, it is peculiarly unamenable to be carried on in social media.

This morning I read a post arguing that the sole reason that blacks in the United States have been more affected by COVID-19 that other racial groups is racism. While I think that racism is a reason that more blacks have died relative to their numbers in the population, I don’t believe it’s the only reason. The reason I’m not linking to the post itself is because of this confident assertion: “This is no genetic basis for the disease”. The truth is that we don’t know whether there is a genetic basis behind who contracts COVID-19 or how severe your case is likely to be should you contract. There’s actually some evidence of a genetic basis for them, e.g. blood type.

Additionally, it’s been suggested that Vitamin D may play a role. Darker skin impedes the endogenous production of Vitamin D and, since the most common exogenous source if from milk and as many as 75% of blacks may be lactose intolerant that could contribute to the matter as well.

My question is how do you disaggregate the various factors? It’s not unimportant—optimization theory suggests that you change the cheapest, easiest thing that will produce the most effect first. Decrying racism may make you feel good but it’s also a heckuva lot harder to correct quickly as the experience of the last couple of centuries should convince you.

If you want to learn about Kondratieff cycles, Robert Samuelson’s latest column in the Washington Post has more about them than you’ll ever want to know. Better yet, look them up in Wikipedia. The explanation there is better. Mr. Samuelson deploys Kondratieff’s “long waves” in a sort of “Hail Mary” to save capitalism which is simultaneously unnecessary and insufficient.

There are three sources of dissatisfaction with a free market capitalistic system:

• It does not produce equitable results.
• It has been corrupted.
• Rent-seeking

The first source is the rationale that is usually deployed in criticism of the system while the third source is the reason that greater vigilance needs to be exercised in preventing the second.

It still remains true that the only available alternatives are markets, a command economy (of which the defects are well known and they’re worse than capitalism’s), or markets mediated by regulating with a light touch to make the system more equitable while avoiding rent-seeking and corruption. That is extremely difficult in a country with as little social cohesion as ours which appears to be decreasing every day.

Eternal vigilance, etc.

In the comments thread of James Joyner’s latest “grim milestone” post at Outside the Beltway this comment caught my attention:

It didn’t have to be this way.

which I think is probably right but possibly not in the way in which the commenter meant it. I’ve done a lot of reflecting on it and I think it’s darned hard to come up with different policy choices that would have led to a substantially different outcome in the U. S. that don’t fit into one of the following categories:

• Science fiction
• Requires knowledge we just didn’t or don’t have
• Requires political heroism
• Requires foresight and spending the Congress wasn’t willing to exercise
• Speculative

They’re sufficiently rare that I can only come up with two. I don’t think it’s too much to think that if the Chinese authorities had suspended travel to/from Wuhan as soon as they had received reports that SARS-Cov-2 was spreading person to person, it would have at the very least slowed the spread of the disease outside China. It would have been based on knowledge they had and wouldn’t have required heroism or extraordinary foresight. It might be a little speculative. Any statement about the future inevitably is.

The other is that I think that if New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had not sent COVID-19 patients into nursing homes, the death rate in New York, a third of the total U. S. deaths, would have been somewhat lower. That would have been based on knowledge, not required heroism, and would at least have been a bit effective. How effective is speculative.

Everything else I can think of violates one of those criteria. Shutting down all foreign travel to/from the U. S. on January 31 would have required some heroism and, indeed, its benefit is speculative. Shutting down travel as early as December 31 might have been at least a little more effective but was outside the knowledge that we had at the time. Mayor DeBlasio could have shut down New York’s subways but that would have required heroism.

Stockpiling PPE might have had marginal benefits but Congress wasn’t willing to do it and it would have needed to have been on the federal level. Vaccines or treatments are science fiction. A directive to wear facemasks would have been speculative and would require heroism. Nationwide contact-tracing (Congress, heroism, and speculative).

Maybe a narrower definition of “essential workers” would have had a little effect but I doubt it would have been material.

What measures that could have been put into effect based on the knowledge we had at the time when it would have been effective would have had a material change in the outcome? I’m not being argumentative. I really would like to know.

Update

While I was taking my morning walk with Kara (2.5 mi bearing 30 lb. of weights), I came up with a few additional things that might have been done that satisfied my criteria. First, President Trump could have taken the development of an effective test out of the CDC’s hands a couple of weeks earlier or had better managers in charge of the agency. Second, he could have invoked the Defense Production Act earlier to get more ventilators, PPE, and tests produced earlier. I think that each of those would have resulted in marginal improvements. By “marginal” I mean it might have saved some lives. It’s speculative on my part but I doubt it would have made an order of magnitude’s worth of difference.

Do you recall my remarking that I thought that cognitive dissonance was likely to prevail over any coherent policies or programs? I got a good example of that this morning. On ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, presumably without knowing it, paraphrased G. K. Chesterton’s famous remark: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed”.

What he missed is that the creed includes free exercise of religion and expansive freedom of speech as well as the acceptance of our contradictions as embodied in our history as well as a fundamental believe in our own benignity. That is incompatible with “cancel culture”, the tearing down of statues of historic figures, and the suppression of books and movies from earlier years that don’t reflect today’s values or, what’s worse, tomorrow’s.

Without bonds of blood, language, religion, culture, or that common secular creed, hypocrisy and all, I see no viable force that will hold us together.

Tomorrow I go back to the office for the first time in nearly three months. That’s not to say I haven’t been working—I’ve probably worked as hard over the last three months as over just about any comparable three months over my entire 50 year career. There were those few weeks back in the 70s I was working on a deadline and putting in 80 hours a week but that was just a few weeks. BTW 80 hours a week is no joke. I showed up at the office around 8:00am and left after midnight every night, six days a week. On Sundays I had another gig. To toot my own horn I work longer, harder, more effectively, and more productively than people 40 years younger than me.

In early March I took a business trip to Boston and then self-quarantined for ten days which was followed by the mandatory lockdown.

Although it will be good to see other people from the office in person (rather than via Zoom) even through their masks, I’m not looking forward to it. I think it will be surreal. Basically, I’ll just be sitting in my office with the lights out (as I usually do) for eight hours a day. I’ll need to remember to get up and walk around once an hour and take a long walk at lunchtime.

But I guess I’ll need to bring my lunch which will be a minor burden. I’ve gone out to lunch when at work for decades as a mental health break.

I’ve got my facemasks and hand sanitizer so otherwise I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

In my opinion the single thing that the present members of Congress could do if they genuinely wish to effect change is resign. In the 116^th Congress 120 House members and 41 Senate members are over the age of 65. And those are preponderantly members of the Silent Generation, born prior to 1946. As I’ve pointed out before of the present Congressional Democratic leadership only one is a Baby Boomer. The rest are all members of the Silent Generation.

Most of those seats are “safe”—the resignations would result in little change in the party balance in the Congress. But it would almost necessarily result in a Congress with a different racial, ethnic, and gender composition than the present one and not just, obviously, a different age composition and different attitudes.