Month: March 2020

On numerators and denominators

Billy/ / China Flu, Economics, General

Have you had the Coronavirus yet?

How do you know? Have you been tested and, if so, do you believe the test results?

The reason I ask is because I have a theory.

It’s not a passionately-held theory, so don’t read this as a call to reverse public policies and send everyone back to work, school and mass public entertainment events.

But it’s a theory for which I am increasingly open to exploring further. It is this:

COVID19 is far more widespread and, on a per capita basis, far less deadly than the current public estimates.

What would we need to know to be able to disprove or confirm this theory?

The following data points for a suitably large population:

  1. The population size,
  2. The number of people who have had or who currently have it, and
  3. The number of deaths attributable to COVID19.

Simple, right?

Not so fast. (1) is easy enough, we have a good handle on how many people live where,

Collecting (2), though, has three significant problems.

Firstly, it currently relies on the results of a test that has not been universal or even widespread in its use – many people displaying symptoms have been turned away when requesting tests for not “fitting the criteria”.

Second, the test is “real time”. i.e. it tests whether you currently have the virus, not whether you have had it and fully recovered.

Thirdly, the ratio of false negatives is not known. How many people have been sent away with “just the ‘flu” when they’ve actually had the Wuhan version? We don’t know.

Finally, we can’t be certain of the death rate from COVID19. Different countries are counting it in unique ways. The death of someone with stage four cancer in one country may or may not be attributable to COVID19 depending on the methodology.

These complaints about data may sound like nitpicking but they make a significant difference to how we might respond at a national level. Or at least they should.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, the problem is the lack of a quick and accurate antibody test, one that would tell us who has been infected and recovered (and presumably, has immunity).

There’s good news though, it would seem one has been developed in the USA and is hopefully on its way to your local population.

I wonder what it will tell us?

Bill’s Opinion

I’m very sceptical of multi-variable predictive models. Minor inaccuracies on the estimate of one or more variables result in wild ranges of outcomes.

I’m not denying COVID19 is a massive public health problem though; even if it isn’t as deadly as the models are suggesting, the contagion rate is rapid enough to swamp our health systems when it hits people with vulnerable immune systems concurrently.

I do wonder though whether many of us have already had it in early January and shrugged it off as a bad cold. If that describes you and you’ve since lost your job, I’m doubly sorry for you.

Once this test has been distributed widely to a sample population, perhaps we’ll know whether the models were accurate or not.

Lastly, I’m in good company.

UPDATE; This is an excellent analysis of the statistics.

Morality in the time of Coronavirus

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Incentives Matter, The end is nigh

Imagine yourself in the following scenario:

You are working as a relatively well-paid consultant, on a precarious day rate contract. Your client is a large government agency. You’ve been hired to bring commercial acumen to a project that, by any reasonable measure, has been an abject failure (a year overdue on an 18 month timeline, tens of millions in overspend).

The supplier has a global track record of sharp practice and, a few years ago, was found guilty of bribing public officials.

In your work, you find two major errors or omissions in the supplier’s work and recommend these are used as commercial leverage to improve the outcomes for the taxpayer.

A peer actively works against this advice and commences a campaign of attacking you personally.

In your experience, this behaviour is highly suspicious. The best explanation is incompetence and commercial naivety, but there is also a not insignificant chance of corruption.

A cursory background search of the individual reveals almost a decade working at an organisation that was shut down due to deep and systemic corruption. The individual also has an active Ltd company, despite being a salaried public servant, with a contractual restriction against “moonlighting”.

What do you do?

Bill’s Opinion

At any other time of my career, I would be gunning for this person using the auditors and whistleblower legislation.

In this time of COVID19 shutdowns and imminent recession, I’m less keen to put my family’s financial well-being at risk however.

Any suggestions on how I can manage my way through this without utterly compromising my personal values?

Covid-19 proves the government is not your Mum or Dad

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, Economics, General, The end is nigh, Whither Government?

Judging by the comments on here, regular readers have a solid independent mindset and don’t tend to be victims of lazy thinking.

This is a useful character trait at the best of times but more so during a crisis.

Why?

Because the government is not your Mum or Dad.

A million Mums on Facebook are reading this and saying, “well, duh“.

(actually, they’re not, because only about 3 of us read this blog, but for the sake of keeping me motivated, let’s pretend).

At the risk of building a strawMum argument, these are often the same people who write long posts about how the government should tackle climate change but happily post family holiday snaps from Aspen or Hakuba each year.

The growing panic around the spread of Kung Flu is likely to rapidly challenge many people’s internally-held instincts that the government is concerned for their well-being at a personal level.

Breaking News; the government doesn’t have an opinion about you. In fact, as we’ve explained previously, the government doesn’t have an opinion. Period.

It’s an easy misconception to make though, one might see how someone could fall for it. From cradle to grave, the government is smoothing the path for us all, every single hour of the day:

When you wake up in your house built to government-defined specifications, you use government-provided water and plumbing services in the bathroom, make breakfast using government-regulated (or even owned) power, read the post delivered by the government-provided mail services, drive your government-approved vehicle on the government-built road to your child’s government school and then to your heavily government regulated place of work, probably whilst listening to your government provided radio station.

It must be quite a shock, therefore to find even a single crack in the facade that all this isn’t for you individually but us collectively. Sure, the two concepts don’t clash for 99.9% of the time but they are about to.

Let me offer some pertinent examples;

The use of masks to prevent catching Covid-19

The government message is that they are not effective.

Ok, so why do medical professionals and other key workers wear them?

The reality the government is grappling with is more likely that masks are somewhat effective but there is a finite supply which the government needs to secure for medical professionals.

There is not yet a requirement to close schools

Ok, but at some point a critical mass of schools will have an infection and pupils at those first schools to be infected will be at a greater risk than the ones closed before infection.

The reality the government is facing is that, by closing the schools too soon, they reduce the number of available medical professionals as a large percentage will stay home to care for their children.

There is no need to stockpile.

Ok, but we’ve now run out of toilet paper and don’t have any paracetamol in the house and our three nearest supermarkets are empty.

It turns out that early stockpiling makes absolute rational sense if you believe everyone else is about to start doing the same tomorrow.

Bill’s Opinion

As we’ve pointed out many times here, the government is a non-sentient being that responds to stimuli. Projecting an ability to feel empathy, guilt, or a sense of duty onto a mass of thousands of individuals just because they have a group noun is a massive personal misjudgment.

The government, at best, act in your interest as a member of a collective. It can never act in your individual best interest when that is in conflict or even at slight variance to the collective.

Therefore, it’s very rational for you to think seriously about wearing masks in public, better still staying home from work, keeping your children at home, buying enough supplies for two or three weeks at home and preparing to sit things out.

Think positively; Netflix, YouTube, Skype, FaceTime are all available and, hopefully, your broadband stays up.

In the meantime, here’s a YouTube video to get you started. While watching it, consider quite how unprepared the world is for a crisis after we’ve accepted two generations of 100% career politicians as being appropriate leaders for our nations.

Seriously, there isn’t a single person in either the government or the opposition who has any experience even remotely appropriate to qualify them to lead a crisis response; they’ve gone from a PPE or Law degree, into a union position or legal firm, parachuted into a safe seat, to a cabinet position to being the leader of a major nation.

We would have done better by selecting the PM by jury service, lottery or Rock Paper Scissors.

Take it away Prime Minister Morrison, tell us all about the economic response, because that’s what everyone is really worried about isn’t it? We all care more about what’s going to happen to house prices rather than whether or not granny will end her life lying on a gurney in a hospital car park:

Scott Morrison’s blood sweat and tears speech.

Compare and convirus

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, The end is nigh, Whither Aussie House Prices

Readers outside of Australia might not be aware of the slightly mad scenes in some Australian supermarkets over the previous week, with panic buying (“hamsterkauf” as the Germans call it) in preparation for the inevitable COVID-19 impact on daily life.

This is the status of the flour section of our local supermarket:

There’s suddenly been a spike in interest for home baking. They’ve wiped out both the plain and self-raising flour shelves.

Walking around the neighbourhood, the olfactory delights of home-baked sourdough and delicious sponge cakes are everywhere.

No, not so much.

The same scene is repeated in the dried pasta section.

Panic buying flour and pasta at least makes some sense; they’re sources of food with very long shelf life that wouldn’t be regretted if there were to be shortages later. You’ll use it all up eventually.

Toilet roll, however?

Nobody wants to be caught short of bog roll but, seriously, that’s the item you want to fill your spare room with in anticipation of the zombie apocalypse?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of a billion Indians typing into Google, “toilet paper kya hai?”.

Imagine a world where, simultaneously, this happens:

And this:

Bill’s Opinion

In this age of “big data” it would be fascinating to learn what the Venn Diagram looks like describing the relationship between two schools of thought; those who believe Australia is about to enter a period of shortages and mass sickness and those who believe the price of property will continue to increase at multiple percentage points this year.

Speaking of which, our tracker is updated below.

The virus has reached Western Sydney University!

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, Identity Politics

No, not Kung Flu, the “everything is racist” virus, (yes, I’m aware “Kung Flu” could be said to be racist, but it’s still funny).

Here’s an academic hot take on “whither quarantine?” in response to COVID19. Spoiler alert; you’re racist.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin:

The effectiveness of quarantines, however, is doubtful, raising the question of what value there is to quarantines if it’s not public health.

Said nobody on the uninfected side of a quarantine barrier, ever.

There is political value in the quarantine for those who implicitly believe biological-racial purity is a condition of health…

There’s also value to those who believe not catching a dangerous virus is a condition of health. Which group is the larger, do you think?

For some, the quarantine rationalizes xenophobia and calls for ethnonationalist separation.

Who are these people and why haven’t I heard any of their “calls for ethnonationalist separation”?

Drawing on a long history of anti-Chinese sentiment, the Australian government has prohibited the entry of noncitizens from China and proposed to transport Australian citizens—many of whom will have traveled to China to celebrate the New Year with relatives—directly into a period of confinement at the immigration detention center on Christmas Island.

Which is an interesting way of saying, “they were medically evacuated, at great risk to the airline crew and taxpayer’s expense, from China to a safe but contained part of Australia. You’re welcome“.

The effect of these policies on some 200,000 students (a proportion of whom are returning from China for the new academic year in Australia) is unclear but will be enormous.

As enormous as the consequences of a national infection? Oh, they’ll just have to postpone a term? That enormous.

As with the extralegal approach pursued by the Australian government…

Extralegal? Do you have any references to cite to back that up? I’ll wait.

There’s more:

These practices highlight what Howard Markel describes as “quarantine’s aggressive potential for harm.” The harm is—as Markel suggested in his history of the treatment of East European Jewish immigrants in New York at the end of the 19th century—exacerbated for those who happen to find themselves on the “other” side of a quarantine border; its spread cannot be restricted along those lines because a virus is neither synonymous with a group of persons nor can it be identified by a passport.

Right, so quarantine is really bad for those on the infected side of the barrier. What would be the corollary of that, do we think? Bueller, anyone?

Read the next paragraph closely:

Measures other than quarantine have been found much more effective in preventing widespread contagion. In a lengthy review of the research on the comparative effectiveness of a number of measures (short of vaccines and antiviral drugs) to prevent the transmission of respiratory viruses—screening at entry ports, medical isolation, quarantine, social distancing, barriers, personal protection, and hand hygiene—the use of surgical masks and regular handwashing emerged as the most consistently effective set of physical interventions.

Anyone spot the problem?

In any event, expenditure and focus on quarantine restrictions tend to represent a redirection of resources away from measures likely to be more effective in both the immediate and longer term.

So what you’re saying is, I should catch the virus because the survivors will get the vaccine quicker? I’m not liking that deal as much as I think you want me to, to be honest with you.

SECOND, the resort to quarantines draws on the biological-racial understanding of nations as discrete organic entities and prevents or displaces a social understanding of health and disease.

Or it’s just a rational response to not wanting to get sick?

It is however doubtful that humans could have evolved without the species-jumping, recombinant action of bacterial genetics transmitted through viral infections. More to the point, all vaccines involve the modified administration of an infection, and immunization is only effective at the largest (rather than national) population scales.

Are there any other events that happened half a billion years ago we should factor into our public health policy decisions in 2020?

…the privatization of health care and the socialization of ill-health remains largely ignored as a contributing factor in both infection and mortality rates.

She’s talking about China, that champion of the free market in all aspects of life. No, really.

China’s decentralized, commercially oriented health system and the lack of health-care coverage have, in all likelihood, worsened the impact of any single disease…

Yes, I miss Chairman Mao too. He’d have known what to do. Probably shoot everyone in Wuhan, but at least they wouldn’t be sick.

THIRD, therefore the combination of the declared emergency, quarantine confinement, and lower regulatory standards significantly diminishes the cost of human drug trials and inflates the value of and market for patented drugs.

What? A lowering of the cost to trial new drugs increases the value of the drugs? (Flicks through every economic text book known to man)…. erm, how do you draw that conclusion?

As it happens, the Australian government has required anyone interned at Christmas Island to sign a waiver—presumably one that indemnifies the government and the private contractors who manage the facility in the event that internment results in infection or other health issues.

In which the author demonstrates magical powers of remote vision.

In other words, the quarantine on Christmas Island will be little more than a means of observing people who are confined for the average time that it takes COVID19 to incubate—if, that is, the virus is present among those detained.

And then draws a conclusion based on the magic remote document reading.

Here comes the finale, Le Grand Salade des Mots:

By way of a summary, this recent history of quarantine measures does not exactly replicate the cordon sanitaire of earlier centuries. The practical importance of virology in the development of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries means that quarantine zones are not outside circuits of value, even while the quarantine acts as a means of segregation. The contemporary quarantine represents a merger between the authoritarian governance of populations and the facilitation and growth of private, selective health-care infrastructure. Given the importance of nonselectivity and scale to public health, nationalist approaches to health are more accurately described as a way of privatizing public health by other means.

No, I don’t have a fucking clue what that means either.

Bill’s Opinion

Angela Mitropoulos is a political theorist. Mitropoulos is a fellow at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Sydney.

Btw, I’m not sure how many Nobel laureates WSU has produced but the winners hold their annual dinner in a phone box on Pitcairn Island every 2nd February 29th.

I’m thinking “virologist”, “emergency ward doctor”, “mathematician” and “economist” would be the best disciplines to determine responses to pandemics.

“Hi, emergency services? My kids have severe upper respiratory problems, get me a political theorist here as soon as you can”.

Everybody was Kung Flu fighting

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, General, The end is nigh, Wokepac

99% of everything written about Covid19 seems to be uninformed speculation at best and more likely, just made up bullshit.

So, just for a bit of light relief, here’s some random thoughts on the subject:

  1. If your first action after thinking, “hmm, it might be time to stockpile”, is to panic buy toilet paper, you might have misunderstood the relative use of fluffy white arse paper in a national emergency, compared to say, dried beans or medicine.
  2. Related; people are about to learn how good modern supply chains are. They are akin to modern witchcraft. As fast as you can fill your spare bedroom with bog roll, Coles and Woolworths will restock the shelves. The supply chain for nearly everything you are going to need has not yet been materially disrupted. Sure, we might run out of some items but there will be plenty of adjacent replacement versions for a long time yet. Well done for helping an Account Sales Manager make their Q2 2020 numbers early though.
  3. Most business travel is frivolous and businesses can manage just fine without it. Seriously, nearly all of it is just status-driven bollocks that a phone or video call could replace and still achieve an adequate outcome. If you’re really contrarian, now might be the best time to book a luxury holiday in Asia this December. Rajasthan is lovely that time of year.
  4. The IT department have been lying like a cheap Chinese Rolex about their capacity to simultaneously support lots of remote workers (*waves at Wokepac). Some scrambling to buy more licences might save a few IT Infrastructure Managers’ careers but most of the bottleneck will be in physical infrastructure. Best get those CVs tidied up and in the market, chaps, and beat the rush.
  5. No Australian manager under the age of 55 knows what to do with their P&L in a downturn. Not. A. Single. One. A bit of a clue; cancelling the magazine subscriptions and daily flowers in reception or calling the landlord and asking for a discount on the office rent isn’t going to help you.
  6. Consider the possibility it might be better to catch it early; you’ll get the best medical care and then it’s done. Later means you’ll get the mass-treatment quality, if any treatment at all.
  7. Stay clear of French people (a great excuse in case they win the Six Nations).

Bill’s Opinion

Isn’t it absolutely wonderful the Woketivists have been shunted off the news now we’ve got something requiring adult attention?