Monday, April 27, 2020

COVID-19 # 60

Kevin Hassett, who is a serious macroeconomist working in the Trump White House remarked this morning that he expected 2020 II to be the worst quarter for real GDP since the Great Depression. There's a reason in ECON 3020 that I make you work with the annual GDP data going back to 1929, rather than the quarterly going back to 1947: it has always been possible to get a repeat of the growth rates seen from 1929-1946.

New Zealand is set to re-open at midnight. They took advantage of their geographic isolation to aggressively combat their outbreak, and have been successul: cases are now in the single digits.

Boris Johnson returned to his office yesterday (10 Downing Street is the official, office-like place, the PM lives at # 11). That's 31 days since testing positive.

King Un still has not been sighted since April 11th. A letter from him was sent to the president of South Africa (although to me that sounds a little like those urban myths of absent schoolkids producing notes signed "Billy's parents").

The Economist had a cool graphic showing that reductions in smartphone movement are income dependent, with the poor reducing less.
The chart starts above zero because the measure is relative to average travel in January, so people were out a bit more as winter faded. The article (free with your email address) asserts that poorer Americans are less able to afford to isolate themselves. No doubt this is true for some. But there are some serious flaws with that. First off, the rich are about 5 times as likely to hold jobs, so one wonders where all the poor were and are going. Second, whether we like to admit it or not, the poor are less likely to follow beneficial directions. But probably most importantly, the measure on income used is by county, so what it's really tracking here is higher income urban areas vs lower income rural areas. Last I checked, most of us live in one of those, and one of the disadvantages is having to drive long distances for some things (and, of course, some of us like it that way).

Georgia began re-opening this week. Caitlyn Rivers noted that their own publicly available data shows that their epidemic is far from under control (click through to see the animated GIF which didn't want to play nice with Blogger). BTW: the large outbreak in the southwestern part of Georgia is associated with a single funeral on February 29th.

Some of you have studied some ethics with Dave Christenson. If so, you'll know what this metaphor is all about:
Mahan Ghafari posted a tweet storm using solid data about the Iranian outbreak.
He dates the beginning of the outbreak to January 15th, with a serial time of 3 days. This is consistent with normal flights from China importing the infection fairly early. He also predicts a second wave of outbreaks around June 1st.
I low-level love this:
Kids back in school, and they get to learn something interesting about history. Plus funny hats!

New research on an outbreak at a call center in South Korea:
Definitely shows how important social distancing is.

Lots of charts in this thread of excess deaths by region:
grib
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)