Solon on pandemic results

From 'They didn't close the deal': New Zealand looks on in horror at Melbourne Covid-19 crisis by Charlotte Graham-McLay.

Weeks ago they were praised globally as two countries acting in tandem to eliminate the spread of Covid-19. But on Monday, New Zealanders watched in horror as some of their neighbours across the Tasman Sea began their strictest period of Covid-19 lockdown yet after a resurgence of cases – while their own country continued to record good news in the fight against the virus.

It is approaching 100 days since the last “mystery” case of the coronavirus – meaning an infection transmitted locally from an unknown source – was diagnosed in New Zealand, and apart from strict border measures life has been back to normal since early June, following one of the world’s strictest lockdowns beginning in late March. There are 27 confirmed cases of the virus in the country, all of them confined in quarantine facilities, and 22 people have died since the pandemic began.

It’s a far cry from the situation in the Australian state of Victoria, where the discovery of hundreds of cases a day prompted bolstered lockdown measures on Sunday, with rules almost as strict as New Zealand’s own stringent shutdown.

On Monday, New Zealand news outlets carried wall-to-wall coverage of Victoria’s new restrictions – with the news generating relief, anxiety, and the feeling of having dodged a bullet.

It also showed the smaller nation’s stricter measures had worked, analysts said.

“The Australian lockdowns were effective but not as tight as New Zealand and ultimately the weakness was that they didn’t close the deal so to speak, they didn’t finish it off,” said Rodney Jones, an economist and principal at Wigram Capital Advisors who has provided Covid-19 modelling to the New Zealand government.

Victoria’s woes have spelled a “major setback” for the prospect of a trans-Tasman travel “bubble” between the two closely-linked countries, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, said on Monday. Such an arrangement would have discarded the requirement for travellers between New Zealand and Australia to spend time in quarantine at either end, a prospect that in May sounded workable but and now seems a remote possibility.

“We have always said we have to be very, very assured that any quarantine free travel we have with any country needs to ensure that it doesn’t come at a risk or a cost to us,” Ardern told Radio New Zealand. “And so obviously this is going to be some time away now.

My leit motif for Covid-19 has been a pretty steady "We don't know what is going on" since January. Our data is poor, our causal knowledge weak. We are still trying to find out what causes spreads, what the herd immunity level might be, whether lockdowns work, etc. We really know very little.

One thing which has become increasingly clear is that early results hold no forecasting value for ultimate results. We are back to Solon:

Count no man happy till the end is known.

The lockdown statists have had their successes. The laissez faire have had theirs.

What is notable though, is that many of the textbook cases, where it was claimed that testing, tracking and tracing, masking, social distancing, and draconian lockdowns worked, were in some of the Pacific Rim countries. New Zealand was held up as a model and Australia. As were Singapore, Japan, Taiwan.

And no doubt, to some degree, some of these strategies worked. For a time.

But now things are changing. Those with good numbers are now seeing those numbers spiral.

In the states, we have seen a similar pattern. California was held out as a sterling success. Until it wasn't. State after state eventually encounters the spread of Covid-19. And so far, as long as you are not one of those states who insist on colocating their Covid infected with their elderly and ill (New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey), it appears that case loads shoot up but deaths quickly peak and decline. It sure appears that Covid-19 is winnowing our most vulnerable and once it burns through that population, it tends to die down nearly to zero.

I suspect we are going to have to wait 18 months or more before we have real visibility on the comparative quality of handling the pandemic. Those states exposed early, or where the Governors were simply bullheaded and unwilling to listen the early science (New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey) will look bad, but those mistakes are done. Everyone else now knows not to put the infectious in with the comorbid ill.

I am guessing that once we clean up the data, we are going to see that Covid-19 has a small, but real excess of deaths above long term All Causes deaths. I suspect that, other than for those early infected and making bad policy decisions, most of those exposed later will have lower death rates.

Ultimately, I think there will be a good chance that most countries will be exposed, all will suffer come excess of all cause deaths, and that those coming later will have a lower death rate than those who came first.

And we can drop the extravagant praise and excessive confidence in any one containment policy. We knew at the beginning that there would not likely be a vaccine in a reasonable time horizon and we knew that it would be sheer luck if we found some standard fare treatment. All we could do was the flatten the curve. The absolute death rate, absent foolish policy decisions or fast evolution of Covid-19 into deadlier strains, was likely to be similar among all states and countries.

You can suffer temporarily significantly higher deaths quickly but at a lower economic cost or suffer the same deaths at a greater cost over a longer period of time. That was the choice at the beginning and looks like that might be what we are going to see by the end. The deaths will occur and largely among the same group of people. Its just how much we suffer economically for those deaths.

But we still don't know much.