Another possibility, if you believe the Chinese numbers, is that group quarantine has a huge effect, as opposed to self-isolation. In that case, you’d have to concede that the cost of liberal democratic civil liberties is a 10x-100x higher naive fatality rate.
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Korea is an outlier due to much higher tech use for testing. So more tech can offset the disadvantage of more civil liberties.
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Pick 2 of 3: civil liberties, low tech use, low fatality rate.
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People like to compare China and the west in very abstract, ideological terms, but really I think it boils down to the political feasibility of a *single* tactic: group quarantine. Everything else is pretty much legitimately available within all political systems.
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It would be interesting to apply Dictator’s Handbook lens to this and determine actual extent of power. For example India is nominally a liberal democracy, but Modi probably has tactics available to him that democratically elected leaders generally don’t.
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This is a good point. I wonder how internal connectivity of China compares to Europe.
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Replying to @vgr
Might look more reasonable if you ran your numbers province by province given size of country and concentration of infections.
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One of the difficult questions is: assuming there really is a “cost of democracy” holding tech-level constant, should you be personally willing to pay it? Can’t honestly answer that without normalizing for your relative safety as a function of class/wealth.
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I’m totally willing to accept a 10x-100x higher fatality rate (on a low base like 0.1- 1%) for higher civil liberties but then I’m not most at risk from poverty, crowding etc.
Healthcare workers at least knowingly sign up for a risky profession.
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Hmm. Would you, in the wake of this, vote for a measure making forced group quarantine an emergency power, weakening habeas corpus in situations well short of martial law?
I honestly don’t know.
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If you could be administered a medical test against your will, by people who have entered your house without a specific warrant, and taken away to quarantine, would you be okay with that? I think it’s technically feasible in the US right now only under martial law right? 🤔
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So... the case that per capita is meaningless because outbreaks are scale free. I’m not sure I buy this. You can’t just assume scale-free based on lack of correlation. A country is a logistics/travel connectivity cluster, not a meaningless fiction.
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A quick chart for those who keep asking for per-capita adjustment:
Here’s population vs total death toll one week after 10th death.
No relationship.
As I’ve been saying, population does not affect pace of spread. All per-capita figures do is make smaller countries look worse.
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I think the way to combine cluster analysis and country analysis is some notion like mean-free-path. The right unit of analysis is neither the “country” nor the “outbreak cluster” but something else. Populations are not structureless Petri dishes. They gave a mobility topology.
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I’d buy the scale free argument if cities were large open spaces within walls where people all just stood still 3 feet apart and virus was jumping like a wildfire through a forest. No. We move, at varying speeds, through striations. The connectivity matters.
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Per capita is likely a terrible way to control for country effects, but country effects must exist and show up if modeled right. Wuhan and New York are both important economic hubs with a lot of travel for example.
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Maybe the right way to adjust is to Ignore country boundaries but segment graph of air travel and road travel connectivity bandwidth by a min-cut/max-flow logic, to define de facto “logistics countries”. This would make Seattle part of an Asian hub, NY part of an EU hub.
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Add an MLM attribution logic. Wuhan gets a fraction of the case count of all 1-degree removed air linked cities, regardless of country they’re in. Recursively back from newest hubs. Many big cities are better connected to international trading partners than national hinterland.
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Idea for a graph theory project: use the flight connectivity data and dates of travel restrictions to construct city-clusters that should be treated as “Covid19 nations”
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I think making it voluntary and paying you a decent amount of money to go there is better and would work almost as well.
That said, I think emergency powers are very broad on the state level. Not sure they couldn’t legally do that.
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I think “compulsory but well-compensated” is a reasonable standard, with protections built in for any harms determined after the fact to have been not associated with legitimate public health matters.
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Martial law really isn’t a thing in actual states. W/o looking it up I think the WWII Japanese American internment SCOTUS ruling would allow forced group quarantine. I don’t know if forced testing would be legal under the current legal regime, though.
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