New article! #coronavirus : Out of Many, One
It focuses on the US, with less than 100 cases a month ago and
over 200,000 today

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-out-of-many-one-36b886af37e9

Thread: 1/

Core idea: It makes political & economic sense for the US to suppress the virus. For that, states & fed gvt each have roles that they need to adjust. 2/

Situation: NY and NJ cases are exploding, but that hides another fact: ALL states are exploding in cases. 33 have now more cases than Hubei when it shut down. 3/

And that's just official cases. We don't know the true number, because we're not testing 4/

A better estimate is between 400,000 and 1 million cases 5/

Some people think that this has been a partisan issue, but it's not true. It's just that it hit Democratic states earlier, because they tend to be more urban, and as a result have more international connection (more cases imported) and higher density (spread) 6/

But not rural states, which tend to be republican-leaning, are catching up quickly 7/

Yet their measures aren't enough 8/

Which is politically surprising, since Trump voters are 30% more likely to die from the coronavirus than Clinton voters given their age 9/

The main concern is around the economic impact of taking measures. There is little info on that, but the little info we have points at social distancing measures being BETTER for the economy than a mitigation strategy that lets the virus run loose. 10/

One of the problems is that $ and lives are apples and oranges, so hard to compare. But you can transform lives into $ through studies of how much people are willing to pay to extend their lives by 1 year. In the US, that's between $50k and $150k. 11/

That means the cost in lives of letting the virus run is between $750 billion and $15 trillion 12/

This should be best compared to war: Imagine we had foreign agents. They have infiltrated the US. They are invisible. They are spreading across the country: slowly, silently. And then, they strike: rapidly, randomly. People start falling left and right. 13/

Over a matter of days, the death toll of 9/11 is passed, and then dwarfed. At some point, it becomes clear that the death toll will be worse than Iraq. Worse than Vietnam. Worse than World War II. Worse than all of America’s wars combined. 14/

The fact that our enemies are invisible viruses and not invisible agents doesn’t change much. If anything, it only makes it easier, because we’re smarter than them and we can beat them. 15/

In this situation, states are left fending for themselves. They are bidding against each other for ventilators and protective equipment. They can't get what they need through traditional supply channels. There are few test kits. There's no contact tracing. 16/

If this continues, states will be forced to seal their borders between each others, to contain the worse epidemics outside of their state 17/

The fed government has a clear lead role in all of this: be the main coordinator. There are many areas where it isn't yet (supplies, technology, social distancing...). It needs to be.
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