Day 114: A Nobel Prize in Coronavirus

Real numbers are leaking out of China again. National Review reports on a dataset from a Chinese military university leaked to 100Reporters almost two weeks ago, and reported at the time in Foreign Policy. Though the original reporters are withholding the actual data and did not speculate on totals, National Review does speculate that the data represents between 640,000 and 1.92 million cases, and that without covering the entire country or the entire duration of the epidemic. (If true, that would put China at either #1 or #2 in the rankings.)

On the Nobel Prize front, "Scott Alexander" has returned to the coronavirus well. The alleged lockdown seems to have made him punchier than usual:

It is the sixty-first day of shelter-in-place. Anti-lockdown protesters have stormed your state capitol, chanting Nazi, Communist, ISIS, and pro-Jeffrey Epstein slogans to help you figure out they’re the bad guys. Inside, the Governor has just finished announcing his 37 step plan to reopen the state over the next ten years. You kind of feel like he should be a little more proactive, but the protesters outside have just unfurled a Khmer Rouge flag, so you hold your tongue.

Eventually he gets serious and asks the Nobel-prize-winning question: why have outcomes varied so unpredictably from country to country? He begins his non-answer with a bunch of graphs showing that lockdowns do nothing—not because staying home is ineffective but because people were staying home anyway. He's not happy with this answer, but he doesn't have a better one.

PlagueBlog isn't happy with this answer, either. It would be much improved by the consideration that people were avoiding the actual dangerous situations: visiting elderly relatives (many of whom were locked down in institutions early on anyway), working from work, and holding large events, most of which were cancelled by antsy civilians before governments could shut them down. The lockdowns came later and did very little that was truly effective. How many people were ever having long, infectious conversations in small, non-essential retail shops? But, back to the unwon Nobel prize...

Scott Alexander is rather sanguine about how we're doing in the US:

America has one of the highest infection rates of any developed country, trailing only Spain. But it has one of the lowest mortality rates of any developed country, beaten only by Germany, Denmark, and a few other of the usual high performers. It’s right in the middle in terms of numbers of tests, beating eg Netherlands and Sweden, but trailing Germany and Denmark (though it may have an “advantage” on testing since so many people are infected).

Why we're doing so well is just another part of the prize-winning question. The best theory he has here is an addendum about age: the US does not have a particularly elderly population as compared to Western Europe. That a reader had to point that datum out to him in the comments is yet another sign of the age-of-death-denial phenomenon, as is the fact that a commenter had to debunk the 10 years of life papers for him (which of course PlagueBlog debunked for you a while back).

You've heard most of the theories he rates as weak here before: BCG vaccination, smoking rates, and strains of the virus. He doesn't go into detail about genetics as an explanation; once upon a time there was an Asians-have-more-ACE2 theory, but I doubt he meant that one. The post goes on to cover a bunch of other coronavirus-related topics because it's nominally a link post. If you need more random coronavirus facts it's a good place to go.

P.S. Massachusetts is up 1% again today.

P.P.S. Still reading the comments at Slate Star Codex, I found the best one of the entire thread, if not the entire pandemic (in response to the question, "Why is it called “novel” coronavirus?"):

Because it was the best of viruses, it was the worst of viruses, it was just the flu, it was a new Black Death, it was ushering in a new and better model for work and education, it was destroying the economy, it was inconsequential for the young, it was going to leave us all with permanent respiratory damage, it was imperative to trust the science, the data was all garbage and the models were worse, we would have a vaccine by the winter, we would never have a vaccine at all, we were all going direct to herd immunity, we were all going direct to the ICU – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.