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Suppose you had a high degree of confidence that both of these were true:
1. The real case fatality rate of #COVID19 in 40-50 year olds is 0.5%, and more or less for older/younger people.
2. No vaccine will be available for mass usage until 2023. /1
1. The real case fatality rate of #COVID19 in 40-50 year olds is 0.5%, and more or less for older/younger people.
2. No vaccine will be available for mass usage until 2023. /1
(We can't know the CFR until we do waaaay more testing, and the vaccine might come along tomorrow, although we're still waiting for the HIV vaccine... so I don't think either of these are especially extreme.) /2
How would you act then? Whether as a furloughed worker, an administrator, an academic, a business owner, or just a citizen? What would you be doing right now if you knew that those two (not especially extreme) things were true? /3
Let's think about what those things would mean. Would people aged 40-50 --- the spending power motor of the economy, on many accounts --- be going out to restaurants a lot? /4
0.5% is one chance in 200. That's the chance of rolling 2 dice 3 times and getting doubles each time. That's sufficiently not-unlikely that almost everyone who has played Monopoly has seen it happen in a game (you go to jail). /5
If the CFR is 0.5% for 40-50 year olds, it might be 0.8% for 50-60 year olds. I'm 59; my chance of dying in the next 15 minutes is about one in a million (a neat stat I remember from a long time ago). Do I want to take that chance 8-10,000 times? Probably not. /6
(Yes, the chance of me getting the virus on one visit to a restaurant is not 1.0. But over the 5 or 6 visits I might make in a months, it adds up, especially when you factor in the other things that normal people will apparently get back to doing after the lockdown ends.) /7
My point here is twofold: (a) It is not unreasonable to think that we may be doing what we are currently doing, possibly with some respite breaks, for a long time; and (b) We should all at least be planning for that as a reasonable possibility. /8
Relatedly: I think our focus on case numbers is ridiculous. We're in a situation where if you are right of centre you cheer every apparent drop in new cases in Sweden, and if you are left, you maybe don't cheer a jump in cases in no-lockdown places, but you do think "idiots". /9
All of the numbers are meaningless because we have huge error bars around our estimates of prevalence and CFR. But we are still working in pre-COVID mode. It's like we're watching 9/11 or the Australian bush fires or an earthquake somewhere. /10
In those situations we expect that things will get back to normal quite quickly. Exercise: (a) How long after 9/11 was the first national news story in the US not about 9/11? (I'm guessing 14 days.) (b) When was the last time the evening news didn't lead with COVID-19? Oh. /11
So we should probably tear ourselves away from Worldometer and trying to read the tealeaves of trend lines. It never made anyone (apart from the brokers) any money on the stock market, and it won't help us here. /12
So here's my risky, Lakatosian prediction: We will not be back to life-the-way-it-was (restaurants and bars will be a good metric) until a year after a reliable vaccine is found. Stop reading number porn and think about how to get to that point, however long it takes. /13 /end
