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Macabre thing about covid is that the same demographics are at highest risk whether you open up slowly or quickly — the poor and unhealthy. Only question is whether they die of covid or destitution+desperation. If you try to minimize deaths, I think they end up being balanced?
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The perverse incentive: every non-minimal death rate has TWO solution points — a slow-reopen one and a fast-reopen one, and the fast-reopen has less GDP loss per death. Moral hazard here is if you start with an “acceptable” body count you’ll want to err on side of fast reopen
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Now, since these curves are obviously hard to estimate with any degree of confidence, most people will in practice go for “acceptable body count” thinking. The more surveillance tech you have the better you can estimate these curves and the smaller the gap between p11 and p12.
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This creates a second moral hazard: if you want a fast reopen, you *don’t* want a lot of test-and-trace surveillance because of the chances the answer will be too far out past your economic preference. Blindness helps the fast-reopen case so you’ll make that a moral cause.
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You’ll derp about courage and grit (of course you will, because you’re likely in a low-risk group) and make a civil liberties anti-tracking case for fast reopen *without* surveillance. Surprise surprise that’s exactly what the economy-first types tend to do.
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But they’re not entirely wrong, because there’s a second factor here... the economic loss curve is also uncertain and there’s a genuine case for fear that it might unravel catastrophically beyond a point.
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Consider this speculative curve, capturing that fear... that past a point the economic breakdown is apocalyptic and irrecoverable
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I won’t attempt to sketch the compound speculation but there are 2 cases here: A: the minimum death point lies before the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B: the minimum death point lies after the knee of the runaway economic collapse curve B is a fake case, why?
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So the leap of faith being made by the test-and-trace fetishists is that the minimum death point will be well before the economic collapse knee and we’ll be spared the hard choice of faster/slower reopening because perfect surveillance will give us the “right” answer.
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Test-and-trace is about identifying the small fraction of the population that actually is contagious and isolating only them. Everyone goes back to their normal life in a normal economy. The only reason we have to shut down everything is because we don’t know who has it now.
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