Will there be panic-buying and hoarding of nicotine gum and nicotine patches?

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Andrew Biggs reacts to Illinois’s request for a federal bailout of its public pension funds:

Given Illinois’s record of poor pension stewardship, Congress should reject any bailout on the merits. And yet the alternative might be worse. I have spent the past three years as a member of the federal Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, wrestling with the island’s 2016 insolvency, which included the exhaustion of its main public pension funds. A governmental bankruptcy is an ugly process from which no quick or clean resolution can be expected. Illinois’s unfunded pension liabilities substantially exceed its bonded debt, meaning that even a complete debt default wouldn’t put its finances back on track. A statewide economic contraction could also become a regional threat.

So Congress may want to offer assistance, but it should come with strict conditions: Any state looking for a pension handout must either live by the stricter accounting rules federal law imposes on private pension plans or freeze its pension and shift all employees to defined-contribution retirement plans.

Private-sector plans must assume more-conservative investment returns than public-sector plans and address unfunded liabilities more rapidly. As a result, private pensions today have set aside more than twice as much funding per dollar of promised future benefits than have state and local pensions. If adopted decades ago, stricter funding rules could have saved pensions such as Illinois’s. But today those states are in a bind: Many can barely make their contributions using the lenient public-sector funding rules, much less the stricter rules for private plans.

The alternative is what the Puerto Rico Oversight Board insisted on: Freeze the old pension to prevent any new benefit accruals while shifting all employees to 401(k)-like retirement accounts. Freezing a pension doesn’t make its unfunded liabilities go away. But it caps existing liabilities while shifting employees to plans in which the government’s funding obligation is clearly defined and can’t be evaded using actuarial or accounting tricks.

Illinois politicians will claim their state constitution prevents pension changes. But it was a misguided 1970 amendment to that constitution that made public pensions in Illinois a contract for life. By contrast, federal laws governing private pensions prohibit cuts to benefits that have already been accrued but allow employers flexibility to alter the rate at which future benefits are earned. Any assistance should be premised on constitutional or legal changes to align state pension rules with federal law.

I don’t think that Mr. Biggs understand the situation completely. Doing what he proposes is, in fact, against Illinois’s constitution. It is not merely a “claim”. It is settled law. It would require amending the state’s constitution.

At the minimum that would require a 3/5s vote of the state’s legislature. Is there any motivation that would impel 60% of sitting representatives to commit political seppuku? Certainly not statesmanship or public-spiritedness. If those were present in our legislators we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

I also find the willingness of people to blame the voters for Illinois’s predicament distressing. The columnist John Kass has characterized Illinois’s politics as “the Combine”: the Illinois Democratic Party and the Illinois Republican Party, like two criminal gangs, have entered into an informal and corrupt pact to divide power in the state. The voters don’t have a choice between one candidate who will do the right thing and another who won’t. They have the choice between two candidates who are largely in agreement on maintaining the corrupt status quo.

The City of Chicago is a case in point. In our recent mayoral election we did not have the choice between a big-spending Democrat and a minarchist Republican. No Republican ran. As has been the case for decades here two Democrats who largely agreed on the issues squared off against each other, both of them functionaries in the corrupt political machine. In the primaries I, along with a plurality of black voters, had voted for an outsider. He came in third.

Back in 2014 I crossed party lines to vote for Republican Bruce Rauner for governor. I felt it was the only chance we had for reform. He won but, unfortunately, either he didn’t understand the political situation well enough or merely did not have the guile necessary to do what needed to be done. He was stymied by an intransigent Democratic supermajority in both houses of the legislature.

I have a question about the use of facemasks by the general public. Is there any actual empirical evidence that the general use of facemasks reduces the contagion of the disease from the asymptomatic to a measurable extent? That the Chinese and South Koreans use them isn’t empirical evidence. It’s more akin to sympathetic magic.

James Frazer in his foundational book, The Golden Bough, summarized sympathetic magic like this:

If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not.

I don’t doubt that the use of facemasks by medical personnel in hospital and, particularly, surgical settings reduces the spread of disease, both from the sick to the well but from the well to the sick. But the conditions of casual contact on the streets or in stores are quite different from those in hospitals and surgeries.

I don’t believe that presidents should ever speculate out loud in public. I criticized it in Obama and it is no better in Trump. It serves no useful purpose and it provides those who are predisposed to jump on misstatements with ammunition.

It’s fine for me at a cocktail party or among family and friends. But not in public. And especially not if you’re the president. Even in jest.

The Miami Herald reports the preliminary results of a study’s findings:

About 6 percent of Miami-Dade’s population — about 165,000 residents — have antibodies indicating a past infection by the novel coronavirus, dwarfing the state health department’s tally of about 10,600 cases, according to preliminary study results announced by University of Miami researchers Friday.

The study, spurred by Miami-Dade County officials, will be an ongoing weekly survey based on antibody testing — randomly selecting county residents to volunteer pinpricks of their blood to be screened for signs of a past COVID-19 infection, whether they had tested positive for the virus in the past or not. The goal is to measure the extent of infection in the community.

Friday’s results, based on two weeks of countywide antibody testing and about 1,400 participants, found that about half of the people who tested positive for antibodies reported no symptoms in the 14-17 days before being tested. If the trend holds, the findings could have major implications for understanding not only the number of people infected, but also how many have symptoms and, in turn, how the virus spreads.

I’m actually shocked that the percentage is so low. We still know so little about this disease. It would be tremendously good news if lots of people had already recovered from a disease and now were resistant to it. Maybe Florida’s sunshine and its more southerly location has reduced the prevalence of the disease relative to other places in the country.

At The Hill physician Scott Atlas recites some facts which should be familiar to readers of this blog since, cumulatively, they make up an argument articulated here by a frequent commenter:

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.
Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.
Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.
Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.
Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

I have some more facts.

1. We can’t really be sure of any of his facts. It’s just too early to tell and there’s too much we don’t know.
2. The incentives point more to governors and mayors keeping their jurisdictions closed than opening them.
3. The risks vary from place to place and, as fate would have it, the risks are highest in a place where there are a lot of opinion-makers.
4. There’s good money (and power) to be had from panicked people. When the dust of this has settled, ATT, Comcast, Netflix, Amazon, and Walmart will be in stronger shape than ever.

The posts that I write on this blog can be classified into a number of different categories. There are quick takes, fiskings, long form essays, aggregations, and others. I used to post one aggregation post every day. I just don’t have the time for that now. This post is one I’ve characterized in the past as “riffing” from a term used in jazz—taking a theme and improvising and varying it a bit.

Bill Gates has written an op-ed, published in the Washington Post that is chockful of interesting observations. I agree with some and disagree with others. It’s pretty wide-ranging going from testing to contact tracing to a vaccine. Here’s how he enters into the discussion of testing:

It begins with testing. We can’t defeat an enemy if we don’t know where it is. To reopen the economy, we need to be testing enough people that we can quickly detect emerging hotspots and intervene early. We don’t want to wait until the hospitals start to fill up and more people die.

That’s certainly true but just how much testing that might be depends on the method in which testing is performed. Diagnostic testing alone won’t tell you that. Even testing every individual in the country won’t tell you that. Just to be clear on the enormity of that task, I would estimate that using current technology, you’d be talking about $10-20 per test for 330 million tests for each round. And that’s exclusive of labor costs. There will need to be at least two rounds and probably many, many more. For each test you’ll need, what? 50mL of viral transport medium? That’s millions of liters. I’d bet that most of that is being produced in China. It’s not that difficult but we’d need to gear up for it and that would take time that we don’t have. The Abbott test would be better but I’m disappointed with their ability to scale up.

Gates gets around to the labor cost issue:

Innovation can help us get the numbers up. The current coronavirus tests require that health-care workers perform nasal swabs, which means they have to change their protective gear before every test. But our foundation supported research showing that having patients do the swab themselves produces results that are just as accurate. This self-swab approach is faster and safer, since regulators should be able to approve swabbing at home or in other locations rather than having people risk additional contact.

That’s blithe but the reality is that would have to be approved by the states. There’s nothing the president, the CDC, or the FDA could do about it short of declaring martial law. The same is true of this:

Another diagnostic test under development would work much like an at-home pregnancy test. You would swab your nose, but instead of sending it into a processing center, you’d put it in a liquid and then pour that liquid onto a strip of paper, which would change color if the virus was present. This test may be available in a few months.

Here’s a clear indication that Mr. Gates believes it will ultimately be necessary to test everybody:

We need one other advance in testing, but it’s social, not technical: consistent standards about who can get tested. If the country doesn’t test the right people — essential workers, people who are symptomatic and those who have been in contact with someone who tested positive — then we’re wasting a precious resource and potentially missing big reserves of the virus. Asymptomatic people who aren’t in one of those three groups should not be tested until there are enough for everyone else.

He then turns his attention to contact-tracing but, sadly, I believe he’s thinking like a software developer:

The second area where we need innovation is contact tracing. Once someone tests positive, public-health officials need to know who else that person might have infected.

There’s an app for that:

An even better solution would be the broad, voluntary adoption of digital tools. For example, there are apps that will help you remember where you have been; if you ever test positive, you can review the history or choose to share it with whoever comes to interview you about your contacts. And some people have proposed allowing phones to detect other phones that are near them by using Bluetooth and emitting sounds that humans can’t hear. If someone tested positive, their phone would send a message to the other phones, and their owners could get tested. If most people chose to install this kind of application, it would probably help some.

He should try quantifying that. Contacts probably increase exponentially with the size of the population. How much compliance would you need for any of this to produce the desired effect? I submit that in the United States we will never achieve that level of compliance.

He then turns to the subject of treatment alternatives. Sadly, at this point supportive care is the state of the art. Improvements in supportive care and, importantly, sharing and spreading those improvements around will probably be the best we can depend on. Unless there’s some sort of breakthrough nature will have taken its course by the time an effective treatment option presents itself.

Unfortunately for all of us, I disagree with this statement:

If, a year from now, people are going to big public events — such as games or concerts in a stadium — it will be because researchers have discovered an extremely effective treatment that makes everyone feel safe to go out again. Unfortunately, based on the evidence I’ve seen, they’ll likely find a good treatment, but not one that virtually guarantees you’ll recover.

I think the more likely way that will happen is, as said above, that nature will take its course. Enough of us will have contracted the disease that we’ve become resistant or are just naturally resistant.

He then considers a vaccine. I think that’s a lot farther off than he seems to. If an effective vaccine for any coronavirus had been developed in the past, I would be more confident. But he does make this good observation:

Even before there’s a safe, effective vaccine, governments need to work out how to distribute it. The countries that provide the funding, the countries where the trials are run, and the ones that are hardest-hit will all have a good case that they should receive priority. Ideally, there would be global agreement about who should get the vaccine first, but given how many competing interests there are, this is unlikely to happen. Whoever solves this problem equitably will have made a major breakthrough.

I think the odds are that, should a vaccine be developed, it will be deployed in countries other than the U. S. before the U. S. if only for reasons of liability.

He concludes:

World War II was the defining moment of my parents’ generation. Similarly, the coronavirus pandemic — the first in a century — will define this era. But there is one big difference between a world war and a pandemic: All of humanity can work together to learn about the disease and develop the capacity to fight it. With the right tools in hand, and smart implementation, we will eventually be able to declare an end to this pandemic — and turn our attention to how to prevent and contain the next one.

That’s pretty good as a peroration but I think it misses the mark a bit. For one thing I believe that what defined his parents was probably as much the Great Depression as it was World War II and, for most his audience, it’s what defined their grandparents’ experience. Neither they nor their parents have faced anything like either of those events and this won’t be one, either. Nearly half a million Americans died during World War II. Let’s hope that COVID-19 doesn’t accomplish anything resembling that.

I have serious reservations about the editors’ of the New York Times’s distaste for incarceration:

Releasing these prisoners during this crisis is not just an act of mercy to protect prisoners’ health, and the health of the prison staff. Fewer sick inmates means less strain on the already burdened prison hospital system. The system was ill equipped to provide proper care to the elderly and sick even before this crisis. A 2016 report from the Department of Justice found that 17 percent of medical positions in prison hospitals were unfilled, and that 12 Bureau of Prisons facilities were so understaffed that they were at “crisis level.” Releasing high-risk inmates will free up limited resources within the prison health care system to better treat those who remain.

A 2016 study from the Brennan Center for Justice found that there was no compelling public safety reason to incarcerate 39 percent of the inmates in state and federal prisons, about 576,000 people. Elderly Americans are especially unlikely to commit further crimes once released. The United States Sentencing Commission found in 2017 that offenders over the age of 65 had just a 13.4 percent chance of being rearrested in an eight-year period after release, compared to a 67.6 percent chance for those under age 21. The report concluded that “recidivism measured by rearrest, reconviction, and reincarceration declined as age increased.” There are more than 10,000 people over the age of 61 in federal prison. Many elderly inmates have been in prison for decades after receiving long sentences in the tough-on-crime 1990s. Many would be good candidates for compassionate release now.

I think they would be largely right if offenders were being imprisoned for the crimes they committed but, frequently, they are not. That is a consequence of prosecutorial and judicial discretion and the two working together.

There are three different kinds of plea bargains: fact bargaining in which the defense stipulates certain facts in exchange for the prosecution not bringing up certain other facts; charge bargaining in which the accused agrees to accept a charge lesser than the one of which they are accused; and sentence bargaining in which the sentence is reduced.

How many of those whom the NYT editors would release are actually guilty of serious, violent crimes? There really is no way of knowing.

I also think that the editors are exaggerating the problem. There are presently 2.3 million people in prison. Accepting their figure of 100 deaths in prisons due to COVID-19, that means that it is safer to be incarcerated in a U. S. prison than it is to be a resident of New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.

I also think that the irony of their position is lost on them. We presently have a couple of hundred million Americans virtually under house arrest. Their sympathy is reserved for those actually convicted of crimes.

Finally, I can’t help but wonder if the shooting spree going on in several of Chicago’s neighborhoods is not related to the release of prisoners from Chicago’s jails using just the logic the NYT editors are employing.