Emily Oster is ... economics royalty.
And she had an op-ed piece in the Washington Post about how the media, and us, and me, can be overreacting to novel news about the novel coronavirus.
Her general point is that while cases and outbreaks make news, the absence of the cases and outbreaks does not make news. For example:
Parents and policymakers influenced by this skewed reporting may naturally conclude that any in-person instruction is dangerous. But they are missing a key piece of the puzzle. There are 291 school districts in Indiana serving 1 million children. Several have been open since July. Even if, by one count, there have been 100 cases in Indiana schools so far, this is likely to be a low in-school infection rate.
It's really clear at this point that universities are not going to follow UNC and shut down face-to-face classes for the semester. We'll get to see how this plays out.
I suppose it isn't surprising that back in March it took UW closing down for essentially every college in the country to follow suit. They were all waiting for the first one. But apparently not this time. I also said in class back in March that all it will take is a basketball player testing positive (2 days before Rudy Gobert did) for people to take the pandemic seriously. But now we have baseball with dozens of cases coming close to shutting down, but now ... not so much.
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