Numbers

It would be interesting to know how people in different industries have experienced this Black Swan event. For our organisation, it's been a massive administrative and logistical challenge which I believe we have managed adequately for, but we are in an industry that can go on under lock-down. For some retail organisations, it's been just a case of initially rolling out safety policies (social distancing; cancelling events) and then with the Level 4 starting, doing the communication for a shut down of trade. The shutdown affects staff, and staff do need clear guidance of what will happen in this scary new world. 

The experience would be heavily influenced by the approach of the government for the particular countries. Take a shopping mall shop assistant, who in NZ should be getting at least 80% of their wage to stay home. The flow-on effects are all different for each person. 80% might seem like a pretty good rate to have essential staycation and watch Netflix, but many people might struggle with a sudden 20% drop in income. Staying at home does restrict your ability to spend but it probably doesn't make up for the 20% loss. (Not to mention, the feeling of additional loss because your KiwiSaver took a hit.) But the wage subsidy programme is a great idea to enable companies to switch out of the lock-down and back into full gear. In Australia, apparently they didn't think to do a policy to protect jobs and instead allowed companies to shed jobs to keep going and be profitable, and instead increase funding for the unemployed.

But a shopping mall shop assistant in the US might have no pay whatsoever to stay at home. A new word, "furlough", is now increasingly common parlance, for temporary halting employment and pay. How can one prepare for that? Perhaps in such an environment the insurance market fills that gap - income insurance is a product for this kind of scenario. 

I worked through this weekend. It was a blessed weekend of work because it seemed no-one else was doing the finicky stuff, the cerebral stuff, the big picture stuff and the wish-I-had-a-moment-to-do-it stuff. I was almost undisturbed and got enough stuff done to mean I could have a cruisy week while garner a few plaudits for being organised. Today I relaxed on the sofa knowing everything was in its right place.

Numbers are a thing for me. Despite my pursuit of languages, I'm a mathshead from way back. I remember learning calculus and thinking it was a bloody good idea. I love a rule that unlocked the minutiae. When I started my long gradual march into management in China, my organisation weakness at the time was compensated for almost entirely with my ability to use numbers as both a shield and a blunt instrument to get my way. Managing upwards is a cinch if you handle your numbers better than those above you. It takes a very on-the-ball superior to have the time to dismantle a numerical defence or blockade. Usually, without a grasp of the detail to unpick it, they let you have your way. It takes either the bloodyminded or the maniacal manager to take you on and try to wrestle your digits off whatever you were wielding in defence and force an issue. 

Anyone who has read this blog for a little while knows that the numerical side of the pandemic has attracted me. Tomorrow, the United States will clock over twice the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases yet just the same number of official deaths as China, the original OC for Covid-19. The contrast between those two facts could be puzzling. Some might conclude that American healthcare is better than Chinese; or more evenhandedly, China was caught unawares and took a hit before it knew what it was grappling with. I'm no expert but both explanations don't consider the temporal aspect. China's numbers are final, they've gone through the cycle of what is now typical in covid-19 control: (0) outbreak, usually with the initial deaths of the vulnerable; (1) wider spread beyond and sudden accumulation of cases in health systems; regional lock-downs; (2) national lock-down; (3) levelling out and then a decrease in new cases; (4) a levelling out then a decrease in the number of deaths; (5) Attrition of the considerable number of people who are critically ill and on respirators. Most of the dying happens in the last three steps and the US is only up to step 1. It's the second step that they could have done but it seems they can't get past the idea that it has to be a regional approach. Several states have implemented so-called "shelter in place" which is essentially the same as the New Zealand lock-down rules, but with an important difference: they aren't islands. You can drive from one shelter-in-place state to a less affected state, and why wouldn't you? Also due to the lag between infection, symptoms, testing, confirmation of diagnosis and hospitalisation, there are a lot of non-lock-down states who will soon be in the same situation that precipitated the lockdowns. You can almost see California and New York emerging from their lockdowns to find that Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Pennsylvania suddenly carrying the burning torch of coronavirus, ready to pass it back. 

"We are not Wuhan," the Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York said, when saying that his state could not be quarantined like a Chinese metropolis could be ("feng cheng"). It is true but for the wrong reason. Wuhan was a "bloodbath", quoting myself in January and the quarantine. When Wuhan was unfolding the stories were blood curdling. There could be reason to doubt the numbers but accepting the numbers: over 2500 of Hubei's 3148 fatalities were in that one city; which were the vast majority of China's 3314 death to date. During the worst of it there were about 12 days where the daily deaths for China, mostly made of Hubeinese, were between 98 and 149. It makes for a quaint reflection now because Spain and Italy have put up daily death tolls in the 800s and 900s as countries, but they're already at step 3. Cases are tapering out; they are almost set to sit down and let some other countries take the lamelight. New York state, with a population of less than 20 million people, has an increasing number of deaths, now over 250 a day and rising. New York State is not Hubei, it's worse. The rate of increase of new cases is dropping so the shelter-in-place rules do work but it's going to drag out, and the worst of the deaths are yet to come. Probably the only determiner of whether they can keep it to a less than catastrophic number will be if they can prevent the health system collapsing under the weight. The death toll for the state of New York currently stands at 1,342. Wuhan's official death count was less than 100 when it was sealed.