Same Thing with BYU and Utah State

The same issue as the previous post appears with BYU and Utah State.

Is this a feature or a bug?

Unfortunately, I'm less intimately familiar with the neighborhoods around those schools, so I can't suggest alternative borders. 

Having said that, the area immediately south of the BYU campus is in a different region than the campus, and it has a much higher incidence rate.

Further, the region containing BYU is huge, extending up past Sundance (admittedly much of the region is uninhabited). But this goes some way towards explaining the very high rates at some of the high schools up there. Alpine is the district with the worst numbers, and last night they opened up a new and improved dashboard, but that's more northwest of BYU. The BYU region is more like Timpview High School, which so far is doing OK.

Why Did Utah Gerrymander the U Campus for Its COVID-19 Dashboard?

Utah is now making public finer data on COVID-19. That's good. 

But, if you tunnel down, the area reporting statistics for the U is split up. 

The campus itself, and a lot of off-campus housing falls in the region called "Salt Lake City (Downtown)". From the northwest corner where I-15 flies over W. Temple, this goes south along the interstate to 1300 S, then east to Liberty Park (but going north and east around the park) then east to include East High School, wiggling northwards to include those nice neighborhoods behind the cemeteries where people street park for football games, then east up 500 South to Wakara Way, then hooking around the entire campus to come back along South Temple. This completely excludes the Avenues, where many faculty, staff, and some students live. It also excludes the research park southeast of campus, and some neighborhoods with some students a bit further from campus on the other side.

It's pretty tough to see this map well, since the whole region is coded red due to high incidence over the last two weeks.

The U is included in the white bordered region in the middle (the dark lines appear to be train tracks).

The incidence in that area currently is 652 per 100K. That's roughly twice as high as the 4 regions bordering from the northwest to the south-southeast sides. And it's roughly comparable to the South Salt Lake and Glendale regions bordering to the southwest. 

Now ... listen up. The scale at the bottom right is roughly doubling at each step, until you get to the top. The upper bounds go 50, 100, 200, and then presumably should go to 400 and then 800. There needs to be at least one more color because those 3 bad regions would be in it, and possibly two because they'd be pushing the border of the next one. 

AND ... there's no decent way to figure out whether the U is doing worse or better. I'm not asking for much, but it seems to me it would make sense to have a cutoff somewhere between 900 East and 1100 East to isolate and get data on the U's stakeholders.

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You can download a lot of data on this now (look for the link at the end of the first paragraph on this page). Even so, I am seeing in that overall case counts for these regions, and last 14 day case rates for counties, but I am not seeing last 14-day case rates for these finer regions. They clearly exist somewhere, but they aren't public yet.

Good News, Maybe

Monday's total, reflecting tests through Sunday, came in with 622 new positives. That's only 9 more than would be predicted if the virus was multiplying at a steady pace.

Keep in mind three things.

First, the multiple, if it's stabilizing, is stabilizing around a much higher value than just 2 weeks ago.

Second, we do not know what testing capacity is in Utah over weekend. That should be picked up by the straightforward method for projection that I've been using — unless there were a lot more tests this weekend (because a lot more people were feeling ill) and the capacity was met.

Third, simply counting tests has a problem. Lots of personnel have to be tested repeatedly, and presumably their samples go to the front of the line at the labs. Here's the thing: that could be a relatively more fixed amount (like some percentage of healthcare workers), with the balance made up by regular patients, and it's possible a greater fraction of reduced capacity is used up by required tests over the weekend.

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Update:

Here's a little bit of evidence on that last point. Utah reported results of 6,799 tests today. But they only reported testing 3,886 people. Here's why the differences matter:

For the total number of people tested, one test per person is included by their earliest positive result. If there are no positive tests, their earliest negative result is used.

Parsing that, it means that if someone took their first test it was counted in both persons tested and tests run, and is also in the cases if it came up positive. But if they've been tested before, a positive counts only in cases and tests run, a negative only shows up in tests run, and no entry is made for persons tested since that person was counted upon their first test. 

What that means is that yesterday in Utah, 622 tested positive, 6,177 tested negative, but of those negatives 47% were repeat tests (probably by healthcare professionals). Compare that to the end of last week, where about 12.5K were done a couple of days in a row, and you get a sense that perhaps half the testing capacity was offline yesterday, and perhaps half of what they had (rather than maybe a quarter) was used for repeated tests of healthcare professionals.

Sunday's Numbers

We got 920 new cases ... easily the worst increase Utah has gotten on a Sunday! Double what we got 3 weeks ago.

The stable outbreak threshold I posted yesterday was 700.

Smashed that. This is not getting better, it's still getting worse.

One week ago was a very light day. Unusual for a Monday. So my Monday-is-the-same-as-today forecast is down to 613 new cases. I expect to easily beat that, and we probably should not read too much into that.

Holy ****!

Today's numbers are in, and they're a lot worse than expected.

The number I posted earlier, 634 new cases, was an if-Saturday-is-as-bad-as-Friday forecast.

It's a lot worse.

Total cases for today are at 62,852. That's 1,077 new cases, or just under a 1.1 multiple from last Saturday.

The new if-Sunday-is-as-bad-as-Saturday number is 700 new cases tomorrow. 

P.S. This is from a chat thread from a remote class at the U on Friday "Wash your hands. Getting COVID sucks."

How to Tell If Utah Is Having a Bad Day Today

It's Saturday, September 19th. It's a couple of hours before today's case numbers come out.

How do we know if the recent  uptick is continuing to get worse? Here's a number for you: 634 new cases.

That's a lot less than yesterday's 1,089 new cases.

How could a big decline from yesterday be a bad thing? 

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Here's how. The case count data is seasonal. 

Seasonal is the word used in economics (and other fields) for data measurements that have a repetitive pattern in them. For example, employment is higher every December due to retail firms hiring more workers for holiday shopping season. Seasonality is a generic name: it doesn't always have to be related to seasons. What's important is that the pattern occurs regularly.

Case data in epidemiology is usually seasonal too. Importantly in this case, there are weekly seasonals in case data for most diseases. The reason is simple: the weekend. Doctor's offices are open less. Labs have fewer people working. Sick people who might have been out and around a bit and able to pop into a testing center on a weekday decide to hunker down at home for a couple of days, and so on. 

With positive test results, they're usually higher early in the week (as the labs catch up from the weekend), and lower on the weekend when only the most urgent tests are completed.

A particularly simple way to deal with this is to look at the growth rate between the same day each week.

This is really bad folks. That's a multiple that's plotted. When it's above one and level, we'll get more cases on a day than we got the same day last week. An outbreak, could even show up in something like this: if it bumped up to a new level, and then stayed horizontal (say, we'd been getting 5% more cases each week, and suddenly we start getting 6% more). 

But this multiple hasn't even leveled out yet!

Do the math. Yesterday's total of 61,775 cases was about 1.09 times larger than the previous Friday's 56,693 cases. So, if the outbreak is the same today and is was yesterday, we should have 1.09 times as many as last Saturday's 57,275. That's 62,409: an increase of 634 from yesterday.

Anything more and that upward sloping line has taken another step upwards.

Here's some speculation on where this outbreak came from (credit to MJ). The uptick starts a week ago Thursday. That's 3 days after Labor Day. The incubation period for COVID-19 is about 4-5 days. All of this is consistent with students away at college mixing with family back home over the holiday weekend. Given that the outbreak is mostly in the population center Salt Lake and Utah counties, and has skipped over some other counties with big student populations (Cache and Weber), I suspect the direction was from the colleges into the Salt Lake metropolitan area.

 

SUU's Case Count

SUU has a case count page.

But it's only updated weekly.

And it only include positives that were self-reported.

There are no testing facilities on campus. There is no information about turnaround times for off-campus tests. And there are no incentive mechanisms to encourage reporting.

Gosh the numbers are low, and haven't gone up much.

HELLO!!!

 Uh ... it's September 18th ... and out of the blue Utah's positives have gone through the roof. 

This is a phenomenon of the last week.

Even so, today's numbers are close to those of mid-July, when the hospitals were full in Phoenix and it seemed like we'd be next.

The charts towards the bottom of this page indicate that it is almost all coming from Salt Lake and Utah counties. Both counties have big populations, and lots of cases, but they are spiking big time.

European Railway Infrastructure: A Big Improvement

Railroads are super-underrated as infrastructure. Europe is finishing a huge improvement.

Yes, it’s an old technology, but it’s a really efficient one for long-distance overland transportation. The internalized costs for rail freight are 69-87% cheaper than trucking. And while externalities are bigger for railroads, total costs to society are still 70-86% cheaper for railroads.

BTW: Many people have experience on European passenger trains. They are much better than we are on that count, but we are a lot better on freight.

A huge infrastructure advantage for the U.S. is our freight rail network and its ability to get around the western mountains. Trains can climb, but only the most shallow grades,* and the Western U.S. is loaded with shallow grade terrain. Parts of Europe … not so much.

In particular, there are the Alps. It’s hard to to explain to Americans just how much bigger the Alps are than our mountains. The only real comparisons are the southern Sierras around Death Valley, and the Cascades. Most of you are used to Utah mountains that go up to 11-13K feet, but the thing is, most of them start from the basin level of about 5K. The Alps often go twice that, from valleys below 2K to peaks over 14K.†

Anyway, the Alps are a big problem for Europe. Especially since the main axis of economic activity on the continent runs north-south across them.

Given the grades, the Swiss dig tunnels. Big ones, that are very deep.

Some of you have driven through the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado: it’s at 11K feet and is about 2 miles long. It cuts through the top of a mountain.

In Switzerland, they dig what are called base tunnels. They go at close to sea level under the entire mountain range. Sometimes 8K feet under the peaks, and 40 miles long. They are like the Chunnel except through solid rock.

And they have just finished a trio of them, decades in the making. These are expected to allow direct, low grade, super high speed freight service between ports on the North Sea and on the Mediterranean. They are expected to open to regular traffic in December.

* Personal trivia: During the pandemic summer my son and I built a small patio that needed a 5% grade (which is common for roads in mountains). It’s a little thing, but it was a lot harder to build than you’d think, and it feels pretty steep when you stand on it. Anyway, that grade would be very rare for a railroad, and my little patio’s grade actually exceeds that of the Durango and Silverton Railway in Colorado.

† Personal trivia: I’ve been on trains in Switzerland where the Alps are so big and steep that you can’t get your eyes close enough to the glass to get an angle to see the peaks.

Indiana Greek Outbreaks

Indiana University is coming clean about their problems with fraternity and sorority housing outbreaks.

This may be a little hard to fathom for an SUU student, since our school is much smaller, and has a much smaller Greek component.

Indiana has 42K students. The greek houses are the home to about 6% of them (2,600).

Almost all fraternity and sorority houses nationwide are located off-campuses, and are owned by the national organizations not by the universities. 

Indiana now has 42 houses in quarantines, with over 400 positive cases. That number was from a week ago "in what school public health experts are calling an 'uncontrolled spread of COVID-19'".

When you think "frat house" at SUU, you might think of a dumpy ranch house south of campus with 10 guys living in it. 

Indiana has some like that. It's Acacia Fraternity house has 16 residents ... and a positivity rate of 87.5%.

But they also have much bigger ones, like Alpha Chi Omega sorority house, with 84 residents. It had a 5% positivity rate during the week of August 24th. By the next week, 35 of 84 had COVID-19.

 

The Williamsville Central School District has had to indefinitely delay the opening of the year for middle and high schoolers.

The reason? Ninety teachers taking leaves of absence, 111 resigning, and 80 unfilled vacancies for strictly online teachers due to high uptake by students and their parents.

I care because this is where I did all of my K-12 schooling, and where my Dad worked from 1970 to 1991 (he was a low level administrator in the district office). It's also where my niece teaches (although she's on routine leave for a bit).

For perspective, this is also the largest suburban district for the second largest city in the state. 

I'm ballparking here. I just looked at my high school yearbook, and there were 49 teachers. I went to the smallest of the 3 high schools in the district, so 220 sounds like a good number for the total number of high school teachers. And if that's 4 out of 13 years, I'm guesstimating that there are 715 teachers in the district in total. So, 1 out every 8 took leave, 2 out of every 13 resigned, and for every 9 teachers from last year they still have 1 online opening. I have a hard time imagining what my high school would have been like if over the summer 6 teachers had taken leave, 8 had retired, and they were will looking for 9 more to cover something like 40 uncovered classes. Yikes.

Live Death

A college professor collapsed and died of COVID-19 while doing a (live) class over Zoom. Her students asked for her address so they could send help, but she was unable to reply.

This happened in Argentina, so my guess is that the antelope in the U.S. will not pay much interest.

FWIW: This class delivery method is called "synchronous remote" at SUU. It's the way I'll be doing all my classes this Fall semester.

Wealth Tax Simulation

Wealth taxes are on the table in this election cycle. To use the previous post, they are in the Overton Window in a way they did not used to be.

So, if politicians are interested in this bit of economics, you’d think they’d ask economists about the effects. Here’s the results of a simulation of what Elizabeth Warren was proposing about a year ago:

… Under the assumption that all revenues are used to increase income transfers (excluding Social Security payments) that accrue primarily to lower income groups. Our simulation of the Warren wealth tax estimates in the long run GDP falls by roughly 2.7 percent, as a result of decline in the capital stock of roughly 3.7 percent and in total hours worked of 1.5 percent, and aggregate consumption falls by 1.4 percent. Initially hours worked decline by 1.1 percent in a full employment economy; …the changes in real wages and the decline in hours worked imply that annual household real wage income on average across all wealth cohorts … Per-household  wealth held by the top lifetime income group (the top 0.25 percent) falls …  [italics are in the source]

Perhaps everyone ends up poorer because you should tax what you already taxed.

Why Is Macro So Hard? The Overton Window

 

Macro is hard because of the Overton Window.

This is the set of policy option that politicians feel will not hurt them politically.

If you think there’s not much difference between parties on some issues, it’s because the window is smaller on some issues than others.

This raises 3 sorts of problems for macroeconomics:

• What if the Overton window on an issue is narrow?
• What if the commonly accepted economics answer lies outside the window?
• Dumb economic ideas are inside the window.

Here’s a couple of issues where the window is narrow:

• Favoring a small tax increase over a small spending cut when the amounts are not large.
• Favoring one size fits all regulations because they are “fair”.

How about situations where the economics advice is outside the window?

• Ricardian equivalence: maybe the size of the national debt doesn’t matter much?
• Price flexibility after disasters.

And the big-mac-daddy of potential policy blunders that the Overton window has somehow moved over is:

• The “green new deal” and its confusion of costs with benefits.

What is a simple economist supposed to do when the right answer isn’t even on the table?

Emily Oster On Pandemic Porn

 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.

The Flip Side of Remote Teaching

Hagerstown Community College has revoked professors VPN access. They want professors butts in their offices, even if students' butts are not in the classroom.