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California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

ucdavis.edu

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Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#161

Post by greedo »

nostromo wrote: post #61
zaroth wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from even the fatalities, the math still is that 50% of LA is presently unemployed. While some articles are somehow gleeful in the face of this calamitous reality, there is no where near a net balance. The Fed has spent at least $2 trillion dollars on this already. Probably closer to $6 trillion by the time we are done. It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit.

Looking at the ~40k US deaths and the $6T spent, we’ve spent $150 million in stimulus per death. Looking at the non-spending costs of lost productivity, opportunity costs, etc., it’s a staggering number.

Your calculus is off. The $2T spent (not $6T) is not for the 40k deaths, but for preventing 400K additional deaths. At $5K per saved life, well worth it. If you want to fault the spending, talk to Congress and the WH about why it's so misallocated.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#162

Post by dmarchand90 »

afthonos wrote: post #159
dmarchand90 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know that "killed by bandits" was a standard in medieval trade logs! Is there a book or article you could happen to recommend to learn more about that?

I was not being literal, though I’m fairly sure I’m right for some not-too-loose definition of the term. Inspiration did come from The Narrow Corridor[1], which has a good history of the building of state capacity in Europe, and how it affected trade. In particular, cost falls, which is one way “attacked and/or killed by bandits” could be proxied. Another thing that drives down cost is reducing the number of tolls al…

Great thanks for the references!

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#163

Post by travisporter »

Talanes wrote: post #28
sieabahlpark wrote: post #3

I mean, sure but how much is it losing from loss of revenue? I.e. sales tax? Bad title and bad article.

The scope that you seem to be expecting isn't possible right now. Anything that's attempting to account for every amount of money lost or saved will end up missing something. The title contains itself to the scope that it is accurate at. Trusting the reader to intuitively know California is losing massive amounts of money from other things seems reasonable. Just because a title isn't written for the most uneducated r…

Yep. A silver lining is unambiguously defining a small upside to the larger downside.

For instance, my niece’s pediatrician apparently has not seen or got calls for any severe cases of flu due to social distancing despite still seeing relatively similar amounts of patients

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#164

Post by Tallasatree »

travisporter wrote: post #163
Talanes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scope that you seem to be expecting isn't possible right now. Anything that's attempting to account for every amount of money lost or saved will end up missing something. The title contains itself to the scope that it is accurate at. Trusting the reader to intuitively know California is losing massive amounts of money from other things seems reasonable. Just because a title isn't written for the most uneducated r…

Yep. A silver lining is unambiguously defining a small upside to the larger downside. For instance, my niece’s pediatrician apparently has not seen or got calls for any severe cases of flu due to social distancing despite still seeing relatively similar amounts of patients

The title was changed.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#165

Post by zachkatz »

cjbprime wrote: post #73
zachkatz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many European cities actually have very wide streets—they just choose to cede space for bikes, trams, buses, and wider sidewalks, instead of dedicating 100% of the streets to single-occupancy cars and car storage like we do. An example—Overtoom in Amsterdam: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3620058,4.8722503,3a,75y,96....

The difference in density and sprawl between pre-car and post-car cities is staggering, and is not about the width of streets. You can't get around Los Angeles without driving on freeways.

Except Los Angeles is actually a pre-car city, and at one point had the biggest streetcar network in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway

With investment in public transit (i.e. approximately rebuilding the original streetcar network and building out the existing Metro system) and a high-quality protected bike lane network, LA could be truly amazing.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#166

Post by Izkata »

natrik wrote: post #128
eanzenberg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad analysis which uses historic numbers and plops COVID against them. Everyone right now is dying of COVID and not much else. Apparently it’s healing cancer and heart attacks. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm

I get the point you're trying to make with the data, but could you expand more on "healing cancer and heart attacks."? Not sure I follow

If they're making the same claim I've seen elsewhere: People who would have died anyway from cancer/heart attacks but also have COVID19 are getting counted as COVID19 deaths instead of other causes, causing a dip in those numbers.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#168

Post by Izkata »

arcticbull wrote: post #59
lisper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... About 35k people die from car crashes in the U.S. each year (or at least they did). That has always served as my personal benchmark for risks: if I'm more likely to die in a car crash, I don't worry about it. I worry about Covid-19.

Funny you should mention that. You have approximately a 1% lifetime risk of dying from a car crash in the US [1], and your risk of dying from a COVID infection is 0.37% per the latest study from Germany (and it overwhelmingly only kills the old and sick). Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet), that represents a lifetime risk too. Which means, your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident remain…

> Given you develop immunity after (no evidence you don't yet)

Not no evidence [0][1], it's currently my biggest fear about this virus. There's a few possibilities here:

* The tests are picking up dead virus remains

* Their tests were bad and they didn't actually recover

* Their body didn't create enough antibodies and the immunity was weak

* The virus is biphasic - symptoms stop for a while only to return later, and they never actually recovered

My hope is that what we've been seeing turns out to be among the first causes here, but we've been hearing about possible reinfections for months.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#169

Post by nostromo »

greedo wrote: post #161
nostromo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the ~40k US deaths and the $6T spent, we’ve spent $150 million in stimulus per death. Looking at the non-spending costs of lost productivity, opportunity costs, etc., it’s a staggering number.

Your calculus is off. The $2T spent (not $6T) is not for the 40k deaths, but for preventing 400K additional deaths. At $5K per saved life, well worth it. If you want to fault the spending, talk to Congress and the WH about why it's so misallocated.

You’re not including the fed balance sheet, which is much larger than the stimulus.

Re: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

#170

Post by CathedralBorrow »

zaroth wrote: post #146
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it’s a jaw dropping number. I mean yes, of course it is. But does it do anything to stare and point at it with your jaw dropped? What does the alternate timeline look like where the government had no need to distribute significant amounts of money to employees and businesses?

The truth of it all is still very much not known. Early antibody studies have shown that prevalence is much, much higher than positive case count would indicate. Potentially 50x - 85x more cases than positive tests based on the Santa Clara / Stanford study. In Boston last week they mass tested at the Pine St homeless shelter and found 50% of them positive and 100% of those were asymptomatic. If when the dust settles…

> If when the dust settles the reality is that the curve wasn’t flattened at all, most everyone was already exposed, and the true IFR was more like 0.25%.... then we flushed $6 trillion down the toilet.

Isn't that like going all in with two aces in texas hold'em poker, and saying "If when the dust settles the reality is that the other guy had a 7 and a 2, and the board was a 3, 4, 5, 6 and a J, then I flushed all my stack down the toilet"? You make the decisions based on the information you have at the time. If you're forced to make a probabilistic call based on what you know then, your decision doesn't become wrong based on the future outcome.

And if you look at New York City for example, can you imagine any scenario where when the dust settles it turns out that we didn't have to do any of that social distancing and stimulus injecting?

Are you making the case that one of the possibilities in this forest of unknowns is that maybe we didn't have to do anything? How does that match up with what we're seeing happening in say, NYC?

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