Downhill

All over the world it's extraordinary the amount of verbiage and criticism spent to say that the lockdowns are an overreaction, and that more moderate plans of mitigation are more appropriate. Setting aside the precautionary principle, goldfish-forgetting those salutary early examples of Italy and Iran, innumerately forgetting that there is a lag in numbers and that the final figure, thus fatality rate, is long away, or medically naïve what long-term impacts a novel virus might have on the survivors, let's just say that almost all the comments come from people without "skin in the game".

"Skin in the game" was a phrase or concept I take from Nicholas Naseem Taleb, whose books I adore. One of his heuristics is that you never trust a pundit who doesn't have skin in the game. What is "skin in the game"? It means some exposure to loss if you are wrong. One of the reasons the markets are a metric for confidence is that shareholders have a stake. (Although there is a certain gamification for short-term gain embedded.) Mike Hosking does not have any skin in the game because he is not held accountable for his words. He can contradict his previous stances or actions he has advocated simply because apart from a momentary blush in a rare moment of reflection, there isn't a loss to him. There isn't even the eating of one's own hat. The man at the bar, the armchair general or the TV pundit can find reasoning or a number, or some doubt in a number, or a perspective, to advocate for anything. Ask them to put money on it and the confidence may wash away, at least by the second round. Decision-makers have both responsibility and accountability, which means that they will always have sticks and stones thrown at them. Idle lips don't.

The classic line of the year is "Hindsight is so 2020". At what point is a reaction deemed an overreaction or an underreaction? It's very difficult to know at the time of decision and that's the unfairness of the criticism. Now that the NZ curve is incontrovertibly flattening, there is a huge temptation to open up and at least get our domestic "show back on the road". The astonishing thing in all this - the most effectively locked down country, China, still has issues with the asymptomatic spread of this virus in their population and are still doing local sealing of towns and cities. The near global lockdown has seemingly halted the growth in infection rates, but not infection. There are still 80,000 new confirmed infection each day and between 6,000 to 7,000 deaths each day. I say again: that, with most countries locked down.

In some ways the granular view of the global infection is the surge in one large area, followed by a plateauing in one area followed by a surge elsewhere. So where China was the first, once the dip came for them, Iran and Italy filled the vacuum. Once they faded, Spain, then New York, filled the vacuum; Spain and New York possibly tending downwards, we have Belgium, Canada, Sweden, the rest of the US, Brazil and Russia charging up. It looks like there is going to a second wind over the next week to push cases up another notch and the death rate too. Sweden is going to be the most horrifically interest to watch. They are avowedly going the moderate view of controlling the virus through mild measures with an emphasis on personal responsibility. Depending if they follow through, they are the ultimate "control" group. They are still early days, and without large scale testing, but their deaths increased by a third in two days.

There is an argument in favour of moderate control, but it is plagued by more assumptions than in favour of the lock down. The assumptions are:
- long term immunity can be gained from exposure to Covid-19
- the health system can sustain the sharp rise in sickness and still address the needs of other medical needs
- prevalent infection in the community doesn't cause greater death to other groups
- the elderly or immuno-compromised can be truly insulated from the virus (asymptomatic spreaders seem to get them in the end...)
- survivors do not have persisting health effects
- the overall economic benefits of a long term moderate shutdown exceed that of a sharp short lockdown ("overall" being a key word as it might take years to really know)
and more.

There tends to be a Faustian deal in it, too, where the "marginal" years of the elderly are being traded in for economic sustainability. The potential economic and social unsustainability of lock-downs are real but again, stamping it out and controlling it is probably a better bet.

The numbers? Well, if I said that New York wasn't Wuhan, after a new reckoning of the numbers, it is now not even the UK, who now lags behind the Big Apple in terms of deaths. It might not have enough gas to overhaul France, Spain and Italy but it is quite a stat... New Jersey's numbers cruised passed China's official numbers.

It has been a week where the lockdown has lead to a slowdown in global cases, which moved from 1.6 million to almost 2.2 million official cases (roughly a third increase). Deaths always lag though, from over 95,000 to over 145,000 official deaths. That's over a 50% increase, a faster rise than the previous 7 day period. This all goes to show the nature of this beast.