Adventures with the Wall Street Journal

Last Saturday, I wrote a post that consisted of two letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. The second of those letters was published in full today. I was pleasantly surprised that the full letter was published, since the person who called me to discuss the letter three days ago had said he needed to edit it down to about half its size. This would have changed the tenor of the letter, since the main point was really in the second paragraph (not good writing on my part, I’ll agree. As the son of a journalist, I should have known not to bury the lead!).

My main point was that it’s false to claim that we have to consider both the need to resume economic growth and controlling the virus – and strike some sort of “balance” between the two.  The WSJ editors have been saying this for a while, and the columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. made that same point again today, strongly implying that NYC had really overreacted by doing social distancing when it did. Specifically, he said (or at least strongly implied) that NYC could have just increased hospital capacity (as they in fact did, with some pretty grudging help from the Federal government) in order to flatten the curve; they didn’t have to lock down the population. Mr. Jenkins implies there would undoubtedly have been some increase in deaths, but the cost of those additional deaths would have been far outweighed by the economic benefit due to the fact that the economy of the city wasn’t locked down.

There are two problems with this. The first is that one reason hospitals weren’t overwhelmed is EMTs were doing triage upstream. They were making decisions on who could be saved and who couldn’t at the person’s home, and they didn’t even transport someone who they felt was likely to die soon after they were admitted to the hospital. Two weeks ago, NYC added 3800 people to the list of Covid-19 deaths. These were people who died at home but never were brought to the hospital – yet they clearly had the disease.

Moreover, EMTs were specifically directed that, if a person’s heart had stopped (usually because of a heart attack), they weren’t to bring them to the hospital as they normally would, so doctors could try to restart it.  There’s no way to measure how many additional deaths this policy caused, of course, but since so many people have heart attacks every day, it was probably not a small number.

The second problem with the idea that NYC overreacted is that there would without doubt have been a hospital crisis if New York hadn’t implemented a lockdown when they did. Since people can develop serious problems within a week of getting infected (perhaps less than that), if NY had waited until it became clear there was a hospital crisis to issue a lockdown order, there would have been at least three or four weeks of unimaginable hell (vs. just hell, which actually occurred and is still occurring) - huge numbers of people dying for lack of ventilators, etc. In fact, if Mayor de Blasio had been less lukewarm to social distancing early than he was (and perhaps issued a lockdown order right after it was implemented in the Bay Area), NYC would probably have gotten through the peak with far fewer deaths than it in fact had (of course, those deaths are continuing, and there’s no assurance they won’t spike again, perhaps to a higher level than before).

Of course, the point of these discussions isn’t whether or not NYC did the right thing, but what literally every other city and state should be doing now, since – with the probable exceptions of Washington State and California – every US state and city is still far from having its peak in infections or deaths. Mr. Holman seems to be saying that NYC made a mistake by locking down without waiting to see if the hospital system could handle the peak of cases, clearly implying other states and cities shouldn’t make that mistake. He doesn’t deny there will be more deaths because of not locking down, but he obviously thinks that some additional deaths due to Covid-19 will be an “acceptable price” to pay for reopening the economy more quickly.

Mr. Jenkins, you may be surprised to hear that I actually agree we should reopen the economy as soon as possible, as I described in this recent post (and I excuse you if you missed that one). In that post, I put just two small conditions on a reopening:

First, no person should be forced to go back to work against their wishes, through legal or economic coercion. I don’t think the first is really an option under consideration, but the second is certainly there now – does anyone really think the workers at your local grocery store are working now because they think it’s their patriotic duty? Of course not. So if we open up all businesses and employers start requiring their workers to come back in, you can be sure that the vast majority of them will be there only because they feel they need the money to adequately support their families.

Since I’m sure Mr. Holman is a fair-minded individual, I’m also sure he would never want anybody – no matter how high or low their social standing – to be put in the impossible position of choosing between their own and their families’ economic well-being (which includes more than just food on the table, but also good health care, a decent place to live, etc) and risking their own (and possibly their families’) lives by working in an unsafe workplace (and of course, OSHA has refused to write any particular standards to protect people now working in "critical" industries like grocery stores and health care. It seems the industries are critical, but the people are expendable).

How do you prevent people from being put in this position? By guaranteeing them a Universal Basic Income for at least the next two years (which is the minimum it will take to develop, test and approve a vaccine, and manufacture and distribute it to everyone in the US), a proposal that my college roommate Dr. Michael Howard of the University of Maine has been advocating for at least 20 years, and which now is being paid much more attention than ever before. In fact, you could say it’s already in effect in most states in the US, since for example an unemployed person in Illinois now will receive a little over $1,000 a week, including regular unemployment compensation and the $600/week that was thrown in on top of that in the first CARES package. 

That expires in July, but if it were simply extended over two years, my guess is Mike would be very pleased with it (after writing this, I emailed him and he confirmed he'd be very pleased with $1,000/week per worker, but that would be enormously expensive. He points out that Andrew Yang proposed $1K/month per adult, and other proposals have been $2K/adult. So we could easily cut the current payment level in half post-pandemic - whenever  that happens. At that point, it will presumably be safe to work, so we no longer will be concerned about keeping workers away from the workplace, as we are now - at least in some states. Remember, this replaces some programs we have in place now, like food stamps and housing assistance. One of the principal ideas of UBI - confirmed in trials on various continents - is that people can make good decisions on how they'll spend the money, if you just give it to them in cash. This eliminates a lot of the bureaucracy required to figure out who's "deserving" and who isn't. It's a lot like the Earned Income Credit, which started as an idea by my old teacher Milton Friedman, called the negative income tax. The EIC has been very successful in raising incomes of people of low income people, and it doesn't come with any conditions except that the person work and have child dependents).

My second condition? That all of the people who have been advocating so strongly for reopening be required to demonstrate to the world how important this is, by working at least ten hours a week themselves in a crowded factory, restaurant kitchen, or counter in a fast food restaurant. This would apply to high officers of companies that reopen (and the governors who encourage them to), as well as commentators like Mr. Jenkins who have advocated so strongly that we should “accept the price” of reopening.

What do you say, Mr. Jenkins? I know you’ll agree, since if you don’t you’re obviously a hypocrite (like the many students who supported the Vietnam War in the early years, but also were glad to get the student deferment so they wouldn’t themselves die in it. When that was taken away in 1967 and they were eligible for the draft, a lot of them suddenly decided they were against the war after all). Please head to Georgia today (I hear there are lots of empty seats on planes!) and volunteer to work in any restaurant in Atlanta that will agree to take you (of course, your resume probably doesn’t include experience in fast food, but hey – I’m sure there are lots of restaurant employees who won’t work for fear of infection. You could take the place of one of them). Oh…and please text me your photo in your uniform in the restaurant; I won't publish it. The gentleman who called me three days ago has my cell number.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 15%.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous week/month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5	111%
March 21	244	35	542%
March 28	1,928	275	690%
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889	223%
April 11	12,126	1,732	95%
April 18	18,434	2,633	52%
April 25	15,895	2,271	-14%
Month of April	65,190	2,319	1606%
May 2	21,823	3,118	37%
May 9	29,027	4,147	33%
May 16	41,729	5,961	44%
May 23	58,618	8,374	40%
May 30	77,968	11,138	33%
Month of May	229,473	7,402	352%
June 6	112,085	16,012	44%
June 13	157,450	22,493	40%
June 20	209,423	29,918	33%
June 27	301,065	43,009	44%
Month of June	926,695	30,890	404%
Total March - June	1,225,415

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 52,217

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,974 (vs. 2,562 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 4% (vs. 5% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 15% (used to project deaths in table below – was 18% yesterday)

II. Total reported cases

Total US confirmed cases: 959,568

Increase in cases since previous day: 33,810

Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 4%

Percent increase in cases since 3 days previous: 13%

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 110,432

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 52,217

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 32% (vs. 37% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 32% of them have resulted in death. Of course, this number will come down as time goes on and more cases are closed in which the victim recovered. But this number has gone down and up since Worldometers started publishing the recovery rate on March 26 (when it was 41%), and on about half the days it’s gone up.