As Politicians Clashed, Bolivia’s Pandemic Death Rate Soared

Bolivia was mired in political turmoil when the pandemic hit. The response was chaotic. And the surge in deaths that followed was among the worst in the world, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

By By María Silvia Trigo, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Allison McCann of The NY Times. Excerpt:

"So many people were dying that the government’s numbers couldn’t be accurate.

Calls to pick up bodies were inundating Bolivia’s forensic office. By July, agents were gathering up to 150 bodies per day, 15 times the normal amount in previous years, said the country’s chief forensic official, Andrés Flores.

The demand on his office suggested that the official tally of Covid-19 deaths — now just over 4,300 — was a vast undercount, Mr. Flores said. But with limited testing, scarce resources, and a political crisis tearing the country apart, the extra lives lost were going largely unrecognized.

New mortality figures reviewed by The Times suggest that the real death toll during the outbreak is nearly five times the official tally, indicating Bolivia has suffered one of the world’s worst epidemics. The extraordinary rise in death, adjusted for its population, is more than twice as high as that of the United States, and far higher than the levels in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

About 20,000 more people have died since June than in past years, according to a Times analysis of registration data from Bolivia’s Civil Registry, a vast number in a country of only about 11 million people.

Tracking deaths from all causes gives a more accurate picture of the pandemic’s true toll, demographers say, because it does not depend on testing, which has been very limited in Bolivia. The mortality figures include people who may have died from Covid-19 and from other causes because they couldn’t get health care."

Push to Defund the Police Faces Headwinds in Some Poor, Black Neighborhoods

In the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, some residents say they view protesters as outsiders unwilling to work to improve communities

By Julie Wernau and Erin Ailworth of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"There have been 200 shootings this year in Englewood, an 80% increase over the same period in 2019.

Yet an increasingly vocal number of business owners, community leaders and residents say they are tiring of calls to defund police departments, viewing protesters largely as outsiders unwilling to do the hands-on work they say is required to improve Black communities.

Black leaders in other cities have pushed back against activist demands to shrink or abolish police departments. In New York and New Jersey, some Black and Latino lawmakers recently urged their colleagues to hold off on proposals to slash police budgets."

"only 22% of Black respondents supported the idea of abolishing the police, the poll found, compared with 20% of Latinos and 12% of white respondents.

Lance Williams, a professor of urban community studies at Northeastern Illinois University, said opinions likely depend on how closely people are affected by neighborhood violence. A person living in a safer part of Englewood may like the idea of cutting police budgets, while neighbors on a more dangerous block probably worry about what will happen with fewer police. “Not everybody from the community is the same,” he said."

"“Are we mad enough to support Black businesses and invest back into our own communities yet?” said Asiaha Butler, founder of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood. She posted her question on the group’s Instagram page last week"

Billions in Federal Covid-19 Testing Funds Still Unspent

Most of the congressionally approved $25 billion has yet to be disbursed by HHS and states

By Scott Patterson & Sarah Krouse of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Billions of dollars in federal funds earmarked for boosting nationwide Covid-19 testing remain unspent months after Congress made the money available, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In April, Congress allocated roughly $25 billion for federal agencies and states to expand testing, develop contact-tracing initiatives and broaden disease surveillance.

According to HHS data, only about 10% to 15% of that total has been drawn down, meaning the cash has been spent or committed to various efforts. The funds for various testing initiatives were part of the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act."

"Of the $25 billion, some $10.25 billion was sent to states and U.S. territories in May to expand testing and develop contact-tracing programs at their discretion, but as of Aug. 14, just $121 million of that pool of funds had been drawn down.

Reasons for the lack of spending vary. Some states are still identifying the testing and contact-tracing services they think will be the most effective. It can take time to solicit bids, award contracts and pay for services rendered. Also, states aren’t spending money on some testing materials such as reagents that the federal government helps them source, HHS spokeswoman Mia Heck said."

"More than $8 billion of the $25 billion is to be spent at the discretion of HHS. Much of that money hasn’t been distributed yet, Ms. Heck said."

"Of the $25 billion in PPP funds for testing, another $5.7 billion was to be sent to various government agencies involved in testing, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. As of this week, $1.62 billion of those funds had been obligated or committed to the agencies, according to HHS.

Agencies including the National Institutes of Health were to use those funds to buy diagnostic and serological tests, source lab supplies and develop new testing technologies.

Federal relief packages also included $2 billion to pay for testing uninsured individuals. Of that, $235.5 million has been spent."

Counting the Cost of Britain’s Lockdown

The trade-offs get harder in a socialized medical system

WSJ editorial.

"Public-health experts will spend years quantifying the full effects of coronavirus lockdowns, but early efforts already point to significant health costs around the world. The latest is a study warning that Britain may pay a high price in cancer deaths for the United Kingdom’s war against the pandemic.

The suspension of cancer screening during the pandemic and delays in further testing and treatment have probably erased years of improvements in survival rates, the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research wrote this week. Britons missed more than 200,000 cancer screenings each week of the lockdown, and backlogs remain.

The five-year survival rate for lung cancer may drop to 15.4% from 16.2% in 2017 (the most recent data). For breast cancer the rate could decline to 83.5% from 85%, and for colorectal cancer to 56.1% from 58.4%. You have to go back to 2016 (lung), 2011 (breast) and 2009 (colorectal) to encounter survival rates that low.

Britain will not be alone in discovering such unintended health consequences. But it’s a notable case because the U.K. was lagging the rest of the developed world in cancer outcomes before the pandemic. Late diagnosis is a chronic failure in the socialized National Health Service. The pandemic made a bad situation worse by forcing officials to ration care from potential cancer patients more aggressively.

The IPPR is a progressive think tank and its report argues for more money for the NHS to treat cancer and a pandemic at the same time. Politicians will pick up that refrain. But it’s more accurate to note that state-run medicine created a system that already failed large numbers of cancer patients, and then had no choice but to fail even more when confronted with an unusual event.

American voters, take note. The virus undoubtedly has had a negative effect on treatment for cancer and other serious diseases in the U.S., but starting from a position of consistently better patient outcomes. Would Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All or Joe Biden’s Medicare for More be as resilient?"

Georgia’s Pandemic Progress

The state projected a budget hole of $1 billion. Actual: $210 million.

WSJ editorial.

"Remember when the national press corps portrayed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp as a villain for reopening the state’s economy too soon? Well, more than a few states would like to be in the Peach State’s pandemic and fiscal position now.

Start with the state’s economy, which had a relatively low jobless rate of 7.6% in July. Construction was never shut down, and schools in much of the state are opening for classroom instruction. The state expected a budget shortfall of $1 billion for the year but the actual deficit was $210 million. Mr. Kemp says sales tax revenue is rebounding and the state hasn’t exhausted its $700 million reserve fund. 

Mr. Kemp says he’d like Congress to allow him more flexibility to spend the money left from the first state rescue. But he doesn’t need another federal bailout. Contrast that with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s demand that President Trump agree to $1 trillion for states and localities. A well-run state like Georgia doesn’t need it, while Illinois has asked for tens of billions more to pay its runaway bills to public unions.

Georgia saw a surge in coronavirus infections in June and July, which the Governor attributes to people “letting down their guard” during holiday weekends, graduation parties and the like. But new cases have fallen 30% since July 26, hospitalizations by 23.4%, and test positivity to 9% from 13.1%.

Mr. Kemp says people have responded to warnings to wear masks and socially distance even as they “learn to live with” the virus. Another infection surge is possible, as it is everywhere, but Georgia is in a much stronger position now because it recognized early that shutting down an economy is unnecessary and destructive."

‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California

The state’s new curriculum prefers victimization to minority achievement, and Marxism to liberal values.

By Williamson M. Evers. Mr. Evers is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development. Excerpts:

"Excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth) studied fruitfully by scholars such as Nathan Glazer, Daniel P. Moynihan and Michael Novak. Also largely excluded are groups like Jews and Armenians who were persecuted abroad and sought refuge in America. The groups that dominate the curriculum are African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and American Indians.

By focusing on these four and treating them solely as victims, the curriculum misses the opportunity to convey to students that groups at the bottom of the social and economic ladder can climb, making use of their cultural assets and the opportunities the country affords them. This curriculum teaches the opposite. It attaches moral opprobrium to success by instructing teachers and students that the Jews and Irish in America have secured white “racial privilege.”

Welcome to “critical ethnic studies,” which boils down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics and victimology. Ideologically blinkered designers of ethnic-studies programs miss out on knowledge and analysis from mainstream social sciences that could enhance what students are taught.

Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics in part for his analysis of discrimination. Becker showed that if business owners hire on a basis other than productivity, they pay an economic penalty. They lose out on some of the most productive employees, and competitors may hire them. But when government policies protect established companies or ensconced workers from competition, that penalty shrinks, making it cheaper to discriminate. In the Jim Crow South, the costs of maintaining an exclusionary economy were unloaded on society. White companies and workers used government to stop blacks from competing.

Such insights can complicate the common view of labor unions as a humanitarian force aiding downtrodden workers. Unions are job trusts determined to dominate labor markets and raise wages by restricting the job opportunities of nonmembers—often blacks, historically. Herbert Hill, the longtime labor director of the NAACP, wrote in a 1965 essay that labor-union exclusion of blacks has had “a cumulative effect in forming the occupational characteristics” of the African-American labor force—to blacks’ disadvantage."

The revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics. Yet history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?

The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights."

Bourgeois Libertarianism Can Save America

Reliance on persuasion, freedom, property, and markets might deliver both peace and justice where "No Justice, No Peace" has so far failed.

By Brian Doherty of Reason.

"As various American cities descend into weeks or even monthslong street disorder, launched by anger and anguish over police brutality, standard American political ideas and groups seem equally powerless to preserve the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically give over large chunks of our fortunes and our choices to government. Many of these protests have evolved into generalized orgies of destruction and even arson, which is the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities and which has been done with careless glee dozens of times.

In the places Americans gather to publicly reason with each other via awkward two-sentence chunks and snide insults, a disturbingly large number of people are insisting we recapitulate the stark choices that Germany seemed to offer its citizens a century ago between the world wars: a controlling, decadent left out to destroy private property, and a right that embraces a harsh, violent authoritarianism suspicious of outsiders of all stripes. 

Both sides' appeal is energized by the existence of the other, and both seem so obviously intolerably evil to each other that they agree on one thing: that no moral or prudential choice exists other than to join one of those two sides and come out swinging. 

The blood on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin (Kenosha, Wisconsin!) this week is a small preview of where that path leads.  

Traditional American libertarianism, to the extent either side acknowledges its existence, is seen by both leftists and rightists as either supporting the Evil Side or, at best, a pusillanimous, pie-in-the-sky distraction from the necessary business of seizing state power to crush the enemy.

But that old school, non-revolutionary, bourgeois American libertarianism, if actually embraced by most Americans, remains the only peaceful way out.

That it's a mistake—both morally wrong and likely ineffective—to use government force to solve most social problems is one of libertarianism's staid tenets. As the past months should have made evident, police power in the conventional sense can't keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to live and let live. State power simply cannot rule a people if even a small, energized minority refuses to let it. If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the "right side." 

What makes civilization work, when it does, is people roughly hewing to libertarian principles, which, fortunately for Western civilization, most people do even when they are not being governed in a libertarian manner. 

What makes civilizations collapse, as we are now seeing, is people relentlessly seeking state or state-like solutions to their perceived grievances, particularly the kind that threaten your fellow citizens' liberty to live, think, express, work, save, and do business in peace, even if you have a good reason to be angry and feel a burning, even justified, need to see things change. 

To begin at the root of the current unrest, a more libertarian world would not have a police force engaged in continual series of overaggressive assaults on citizens, whether or not suspected of crimes. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline for their crimes that most citizens are. 

At that same time, a more thoroughly libertarian world would not see certain tactics pursued by some on the progressive left who agree with the libertarian goal of reducing police's unjust spasms of "authority." For instance, that world would not have angry mobs insisting threateningly that random fellow citizens join them in some public expression of political piety, however noble the cause. It would also lack roving mobs setting fire to buildings and breaking windows. 

Those actions, unchecked and continual, tear at the roots of civilization that have made us as wealthy as we are—the relatively free and unmolested ability of people to possess wealth and space and use it to offer goods and services to others for a price. 

American movement libertarianism was revolutionary—but only intellectually so. Most American libertarians, even in the face of continual obscene injustices on the part of the state, never figured that reducing the civic order to a violent battlefield was the just or prudent response, especially in a world where most fellow citizens didn't want libertarian governance. The mission has always been selling people on the idea that they would benefit from more libertarian governance.

Thus, the notion of "no justice, no peace" that animates both angry anti-police-brutality progressives and major aspects of historic American foreign policy doesn't quite ring true for most American libertarians. Another country's criminality has often been insufficient to convince many libertarians that the mass life and property destruction of war were justified. Likewise, even though they are inspired by justified anger at recalcitrant and evil government policy, the weeks of property destruction and occasional attacks on bystanders are perhaps not the just or effective response.

Libertarians have a narrow sense of when and how force can be justly brought to bear to right wrongs. When it comes to either overseas war or domestic battles to change government policy or public attitudes, most libertarians can't agree that the lives and property of those innocent of committing the crime should suffer, especially when the connection between the violence or destruction and righting all relevant wrongs is tentative and uncertain.

The standard American libertarian has been traditionally and boringly bourgeois. Many think that while preserving life is indeed a higher priority than preserving property, property's vital role in human flourishing and happiness both individually and socially means that one cannot blithely treat it as sacrificeable to make some point about how angry you are or to pursue a vaguely seen path to "justice" for others.

The fanaticism of seeking to bloodily right all the world's wrongs, then, was never really the libertarian thing. The love of peace and prosperity that motivates libertarians to embrace liberty inclined them to think that truly effective and secure social change came not from violence, chaos, and force, but from treating fellow human minds and bodies with respect, as ends not means, and attempting to persuade them that libertarian ideas ought to shape human social life. 

The fanatical pursuit of "no justice, no peace" makes any reasonable civic life impossible. In a polity where agreement from a critical mass of your fellow citizens is necessary, certain sacrifices of peace in pursuit of justice will likely damage your chances of getting the kind of justice you say you want.

Such possibly counterproductive sacrifices include large scale denials of the right to use public streets unmolested and the idea that the livelihoods and savings of people with no direct connection to the wrongs can be justly ruined, most especially given what we know about how weeks or months of urban violence destroy prosperity for decades 

Those craving hope for America's near future might take small comfort in the fact that, as newsmaking as they rightly are, as fascinatingly grim as they are to discuss, as much as they dramatize in a colorfully violent way real fault lines in the beliefs and hopes of America writ large, the number of people so far fighting in the streets, breaking windows, and setting fires is very, very tiny in comparison to the vast number of Americans who do in fact, consciously or unconsciously, live their lives according to the tenets of bourgeois libertarianism.

That is the lived philosophy of the peaceful enjoyment of life and property, mostly minding one's own business, living and letting live, not enforcing orthodoxies of thought and expression no matter how good the cause, or treating other people's lives and property as sacrificable for a political goal. We are seeing that even a small number of people choosing to not live in accordance with those libertarian principles creates civic spaces in which no one can thrive—not even, in the long run, the people choosing to create chaos in the name of justice."

4 Life-Threatening Unintended Consequences of the Lockdowns

No matter how smart or well-intentioned central planners are, they can't possibly understand all the implications of the choices they're making. 

By Brad Polumbo of FEE.

"When policymakers across the country decided to “lock down” in response to the March outbreak of the novel coronavirus, they took a leap into the unknown. Not only did we know little about COVID-19 itself at that time, but we knew almost nothing about how shutting down nearly all of society would affect people.

Policymakers focused on their models predicting how lockdowns could help limit the spread of COVID-19; an important factor, to be sure. So, too, many acknowledged the negative economic ramifications of lockdowns. But in the months since, we’ve seen many other dire consequences stem from the unprecedented shutdown of society.

Future public health policy should take these four life-threatening unintended consequences of COVID-19 lockdowns into account.

1) Massive Spikes in Suicide Rates and Mental Health Crises

Even the most fortunate among us felt the emotional strain from months behind closed doors. Being cut off from friends, family, and many of the other things that give life meaning has proved too much for many of those who were already struggling.

As FEE.org Managing Editor Jon Militmore has detailed, the Centers for Disease Control found that one in four young people have had suicidal thoughts during the pandemic to date. (For comparison, less than six percent of young people harbored similar thoughts in 2008-2009 according to older CDC data). And more than 40 percent of respondents said the crisis had prompted mental health or behavioral problems. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that suicidality increased during lockdown.

Given that young people without preconditions are at almost zero risk of death from COVID-19 and the well-documented deleterious effects of social isolation, it’s fair to largely attribute this disturbing trend in mental health to lockdowns.

2) Uptick in Drug Overdoses and Substance Abuse

Naturally, social isolation and despair are key triggers for substance abuse relapse. So it’s no surprise to see the emotional and mental consequences of COVID-19 lockdowns have exacerbated an already-severe drug crisis in the US.

This has played out in my backyard, the Washington, DC metro area.

“In April, the most recent month for which statistics are available, the city [of Washington DC] saw its largest monthly number of opioid overdoses in five years,” the Washington Post reports. “[This] is part of a national trend of overdose increases that health experts say has accelerated in recent months.”

Meanwhile, Maryland saw more than double the opioid overdose fatalities in the first quarter of this year compared to the previous year. And in Virginia, state officials estimate that they will “record almost 1,700 such fatalities by year’s end—the highest annual toll since at least 2007.”

This is a country-wide trend. NPR reports that overdoses nationally have spiked by about 18 percent. For comparison, in 2018, more than 67,300 Americans died from drug overdoses. An 18 percent increase undoubtedly means thousands of additional tragic overdose deaths.

3) Economic Devastation Leads to Hunger

The US Census Bureau recently surveyed Americans on how the COVID-19 crisis has affected their ability to feed their families, and the results are chilling.

“The number of Americans who say they can’t afford enough food for themselves or their children is growing,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “As of late last month, about 12.1% of adults lived in households that didn’t have enough to eat at some point in the previous week, up from 9.8% in early May, Census figures show. And almost 20% of Americans with kids at home couldn’t afford to give their children enough food, up from almost 17% in early June.”

Meanwhile, food banks report unprecedented, surging levels of demand for their charitable services.

Closing down businesses and schools might have limited the spread of COVID-19. But it’s also clear the economic consequences of the lockdowns caused mass malnutrition and even pushed many American families to the brink of starvation. (Globally, the COVID-19 lockdowns could push up to 100 million people into extreme poverty.)

4) Surge in Domestic Violence Under COVID-19 Lockdowns

Tragically, trapping people at home and cutting them off from outside support is a recipe for domestic violence. This has played out on a global level, with reports of skyrocketing domestic violence amid tension and home confinement in India, Mexico City, the United Kingdom, and other nations around the world.

There’s reason to believe the US has experienced a similar trend. One study published in the journal Radiology found greatly increased levels of injuries consistent with domestic violence wounds at a Massachusetts hospital during the state’s stay-at-home emergency order.

"This data confirms what we suspected," the study’s co-author told US News and World Report. "Being confined to home for a period of time would increase the possibility for violence between intimate partners."

A separate study analyzing data from police precincts in several major US cities also showed increases in domestic violence during the lockdown period, with the increases ranging from 10 percent to 27 percent.

Unintended Consequences Necessitate Humble Policymaking

These dire unintended consequences of COVID-19 lockdowns are tragic, but frankly, they aren’t so shocking. We have long known that sweeping government interventions have ripple effects that extend far beyond their intended goals.

Why? Because of what economic philosopher Friedrich Hayek called the “knowledge problem.”

“If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place,” Hayek wrote. “It would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”

Simply, the knowledge problem means that central planning efforts are doomed to fail. Only those closest to a problem know the ins and outs of it.

For example, can you imagine planning a birthday party for a person you’ve never met? You don’t know what kind of cake they like. You don’t know if they prefer pepperoni pizza or Hawaiian pizza. You don’t even know who to invite. Now, what are the odds you can plan a party that won’t go horribly?

This is the Herculean task that awaits government officials who try to dictate the every behavior of millions of individuals.

So, when it comes to sweeping, nation-wide pandemic lockdowns, central planners will never be able to adequately assess all the deadly unintended consequences that correspond with their drastic actions. This doesn’t mean the government should do nothing at all in the public health arena, but that elected officials ought to be far more humble in the extent of their actions. The deadly unintended consequences of sweeping COVID-19 lockdowns remind us why."

How the Virus Penetrated Fortress New Zealand

By Phillip W. Magness.

"New Zealand was supposed to show the world how the pandemic could be halted. The island nation largely avoided the first wave of the outbreak in March on the account of its remoteness and the hasty imposition of border controls. As the novel COVID-19 virus ravaged its way across the vulnerable populations of Asia, Europe, and North America, New Zealand locked down its entire society.

“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous” ~ Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death

On March 22, the nation’s government announced a month of sheltering in place. The order came from on high with the stroke of a pen, without legislative deliberation or even the process of law. Enforcement persisted for nine days despite having no legal justification – just an illegal executive decree by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Months would pass before the country’s high court censured this abrogation of democratic governance. It did not matter. Ardern’s actions were “unlawful, but justified” to halt the pandemic, the bold actions of a “hero” who knew better than her own people.

For the next month New Zealand operated under the strictest lockdowns in the world, surpassing even communist China at the peak of its Wuhan region quarantine. The country reached an astounding 96.3 out of 100 points on the Oxford lockdown stringency index.

“Act like you have COVID-19” and stay home, came the order from above. Stores and businesses were forcibly shuttered. Internal movement around the country was forbidden, followed by restrictions on even leaving one’s own home, save to obtain groceries or medicine. Ardern ordered the military to patrol the streets for violators. Police set up a website to encourage New Zealanders to report on neighbors who ventured outside for unapproved reasons. New Zealanders used it to file over 4,300 reports within the first week alone. Arrests were made for “persistent breaches” of the mandate. The Prime Minister chasisted her citizenry for disobeying, and directed them to use the police snitch form – and all of this done at a time, as we now know, that her mandates still operated outside of the cover of law that it finally secured by post hoc legislative ratification in early April.

“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.”

Ardern’s actions elicited barely a word of dissent, and those who did speak out found themselves the subject of scolding mobs. How dare they “question the science” – or the leadership of a rising progressive political star. Instead, the media showered her with praise and puff-pieces about her gimmicky uses of social media to soft-peddle the police state she had just imposed. 

New Zealanders needn’t worry about their slide into autocracy – the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy had been deemed “essential workers” and thus exempt from the decree. The rule of law had been sacrificed to epidemiology modeling and “nonpharmaceutical interventions.”

Socialist Cindy placed her entire country under house arrest, and did so to thunderous applause for her boldness, her heroism, and her “science”-driven leadership. In the eyes of the press and much of the epidemiology profession, Ardern had become a model of COVID leadership for the world to emulate.

“A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.”

New Zealand suspended its internal lockdown in mid-May after a month of shelter-in-place mandates and another half-month at a level of stringency that exceeded all but the hardest-hit European nations. In total, New Zealand police prosecuted over 600 lockdown violators, and issued warnings to another 5,000.

To the adoring news media however, Ardern’s leadership had proven an unambiguous success. Owing to its early containment, COVID-19 never really took root in New Zealand and the tiny number of cases that made it through before the lockdowns proved to be a manageable number. “We are confident we have eliminated transmission of the virus in New Zealand for now,” Ardern announced in early June.

Like much of the world, the lockdowns left New Zealand’s economy in tatters. The country posted its largest GDP contraction in three decades for the first quarter of 2020. Much of the contraction likely stems from the country’s tourism-heavy economy, which seems unlikely to recover anytime soon as it is effectively proscribed for an indefinite term by government mandate.

You see, Ardern’s strategy for lifting the internal lockdowns rested upon maintaining one of the world’s most restrictive border entry policies. The New Zealand border remains closed for all intents and purposes for foreign visitors prohibited save for a tiny number of exceptions. New Zealand residents who were stranded abroad at the start of the pandemic – likely numbering in the tens of thousands – may only return after going through a mandatory 14-day quarantine under strict guard at a designated border facility. 

Persons who do not qualify for a handful of exemptions must also foot the bill themselves – a total of $4,000 (NZ) for the privilege of being cooped up in a government-managed hotel room. Ardern’s government has also intentionally restricted flights into the country as a strategy for rationing the available quarantine spaces.

For all intents and purposes, Ardern created Fortress New Zealand – a bubble strategy in which the internal reopening rests entirely upon the government’s ability to erect and maintain a nearly impermeable barrier to entry from the rest of the world. Furthermore, such a strategy must continue indefinitely until there is a coronavirus vaccine or cure.

“It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.”

It was supposed to be an occasion for celebration. New Zealand passed the mark of “100 days without COVID,” we learned on August 9^th. New Zealand, it appeared, had beaten back and defeated the disease. Media commentators across the globe proclaimed the strategy victorious – an “emblematic champion of proper prevention and response to the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.”

Epidemiologists used the occasion to proclaim vindication of lockdowns, border closures, and “science-based” progressive government. “New Zealand is seen as a global exemplar,” announced the World Health Organization’s Director-General in an August 10^th statement. A combination of strict lockdowns, border closures, contact tracing, and enforcement had made New Zealand “COVID-free,” and for that Ardern’s government “would make no apologies.”

The American media, which had already been championing the New Zealand approach for months, touted the case as an example of what could have been if only the United States and other countries stuck with their lockdown strategies. 

“In New Zealand, life is ordinary again after 100 days with no community spread,” announced a triumphalist report from NPR.

The 100-day mark also carried high political significance for Ardern, who came to power in 2017 under a tenuous coalition arrangement between the left-wing Labour Party with a smaller nationalist-populist party best known for its hardline anti-immigration stance (Ardern reconciled her coalition at the time by adopting immigration restrictions of her own on the grounds that they would help to achieve “environmental sustainability”). 

Under normal times the Labour-New Zealand First coalition might have expected a strong challenge from the center-right National Party, which holds a plurality of seats in the New Zealand parliament.

But 2020 was meant to be the COVID election – a victory lap for the governing coalition after having successfully driven the disease from the island nation, as the external world still struggled to contain the virus. Ardern used the 100-day mark to kick off her reelection effort with a day full of campaign stops and politicking to get out the vote. “When people ask, is this a COVID election, my answer is yes, it is,” she explained at a campaign launch party the day before the milestone. For all intents and purposes, the media predicted an easy coast to reelection, fueled by the successful defeat of the virus.

“And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before.”

It happened on the 102^nd day, and it took the world by surprise. The festivities of the milestone and the associated electoral campaign had yet to dissipate, but COVID-19 was back in New Zealand. A family of four tested positive in Auckland, triggering a panicked government plan to contain its spread.

Within 24 hours the country’s largest city was back under lockdown. Police checkpoints, internal travel restrictions, police and military in the streets, arrests for violating lockdowns, runs on supermarkets, appeals to snitch on violators – a mad rush to contain the spread by any means necessary.

Government authorities still do not know how the virus made it through the border fortress, but it breached the walls nonetheless. Then the familiar, frantic pattern set in. The initial 3-day lockdown of Auckland became 12 days. As the expiration date approached, Ardern slapped on another emergency extension that will supposedly expire August 30. But coronavirus has a strange track record of converting previously habitable places into geographical oddities – two weeks from everywhere.

Media outlets that celebrated the 100-day milestone suddenly found themselves having to explain what went wrong, with little in the way of a plausible story. Within less than 24 hours of posting, NPR even hastily amended the aforementioned headline to account for the change of circumstances: “In New Zealand, Life Was Ordinary Again With No Virus Spread, But It Didn’t Last.”

“When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.”

The unexpected outbreak similarly upended Ardern’s predicted coast to reelection, taking the centerpiece of her campaign message with it. With evidence of the containment policy’s effectiveness shattered but an ideological resolve to double down and stay the course, the Prime Minister now comes across as simultaneously panicked, enraged, and flustered.

Amid the self-imposed chaos of the Auckland lockdown and mounting pressures from opposition parties, Ardern exercised her legal prerogative as Prime Minister and pushed back the polling date by a month. It remains to be seen how New Zealanders will react when they go to the polls in mid-October, save to note that it will likely hinge on the uncertainty of the renewed lockdowns and on the competing parties’ abilities to frame the latest outbreak to their advantage at the ballot box.

The current outbreak notwithstanding, it still remains true that New Zealand has weathered the medical dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic better than most. The country currently stands at a little over 1,700 cases and 22 fatalities – a tiny fraction of the devastation seen in hotspots around the globe. But these medical statistics conceal an unsettling reality about how Ardern’s government has weathered the crisis. 

Far from a paragon of science-guided policy, the New Zealand approach hearkens back to the time of medieval plagues and associated superstitions – of walling oneself off in a castellated abbey in the countryside for the duration, of hoping, praying the crisis will pass by your fortress as it ravages the outside world, and of inevitably letting one’s guard down at a moment of frivolity and celebration.

And for a passing moment, such a strategy may nominally succeed – particularly if the fortress is isolated – as remote Pacific islands tend to be – and if one is willing to accept isolationism backed by the recurring and draconian enforcement measures to maintain it. But the fortress approach to a pandemic is neither a sustainable strategy for New Zealand nor an adaptable model for the rest of the world. 

As the events of the last three weeks demonstrate, the perceived victories of the Ardern government on its 100-day milestone were fleeting, overturned in an instant by human error or even a chance occurrence that somehow allowed the virus to slip through the gatehouse.

The Ardern government’s current low case count only conceals a much greater and self-inflicted vulnerability that arises from the lockdown strategy. The policy of eliminating COVID-19 by shutting out the rest of the world only “works” if one assumes that they can perfectly maintain the bubble until somebody on the outside discovers a vaccine, or the virus dissipates globally from external herd immunity.

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.”

But the medieval strategy of lockdown-imposed isolation is inherently fragile – so fragile, in fact, that it can collapse into chaos at any moment, precipitating a mad rush to regain the illusions of control over the situation. If even the slightest thing goes wrong though – if somebody slips through the border with an undetected case, if a bureaucratic administrator makes a paperwork mistake, if a worker who came into contact with an infected person in quarantine forgot to wash his or her hands, or untold thousands of other similar scenarios play out – then the whole system of isolation and containment collapses. It’s back to rolling lockdowns, imposed without warning at any moment, and continuing in perpetuity.

Far from adopting this strategy as a model, the world must avoid the corner of perpetual recurring lockdowns in which New Zealand now finds itself. And New Zealand’s government would be wise to drop the hubristic pretensions of commanding and controlling a virus through medieval self-isolation, seeking instead an alternative strategy that is robust to unexpected setbacks and equipped for long-run recovery."

Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns?

A new study suggests that a second higher wave of infections can be avoided.

By Ronald Bailey of Reason.

"Human beings are often terrible at foresight and generally learn hard lessons chiefly from failure. That has certainly been the case for the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, politicians, and the public, by means of repeated policy failures, are still learning what works when it comes to mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

A partial list of initial failures in the U.S. includes underestimating the virulence of the pathogen by some public health officials; a massive bureaucratic screw-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that delayed the rollout of diagnostic testing as the pandemic was taking off; the belief that airborne transmission was not a significant route of infection but instead the virus was chiefly passed along via direct contact with infected people and indirect contact with surfaces in the immediate environment; the early assertion that citizens didn't need to wear face masks to protect themselves from infection; epidemiological models making worst-case projections of millions of COVID-19 deaths by assuming that people wouldn't change their behaviors; the claim that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a "game changer" as a COVID-19 treatment; and a president who has doggedly insisted since February that the virus would miraculously fade or disappear soon.

So what has been learned over the past eight months? While conclusions are still preliminary, researchers now calculate that the COVID-19 coronavirus is about three times more contagious than seasonal flu; the availability of diagnostic testing in the U.S. has greatly improved but is still nowhere near where it needs to be; airborne transmission contributes significantly to the spread of the disease; when the background rate of infections is high the widespread adoption of face masks is an effective and very economically valuable method for stemming COVID-19 infections; when epidemiological models took into account actual changes in human behavior, their COVID-19 death projections declined steeply; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not a useful COVID-19 therapeutic. But what about President Donald Trump's oft-repeated prediction that the virus will one day soon just disappear?

Epidemiological research suggests that COVID-19 will only fade away once the threshold for herd immunity is reached. Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results if a sufficiently high proportion of a population is immune to the illness. Some people are still susceptible, but they are surrounded by immune individuals who serve as a barrier, preventing the microbes from reaching them. Herd immunity can be achieved via mass infection or mass vaccination. Epidemiologists estimate that the COVID-19 threshold for herd immunity is around 60 to 70 percent.

Some of Trump's fans have recently been touting the idea that COVID-19 herd immunity is closer than initial epidemiological projections have suggested. I, too, have reported that very preliminary studies on unsuspected preexisting T-cell immunity to the coronavirus and speculative modeling results suggest that the effective herd immunity threshold may actually be close, at least, in some countries and some regions of the U.S. (In other words, the possibility of a lower herd immunity threshold is a lucky accident, not the result of presidential prescience.)

Now a new modeling study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the COVID-19 "heterogeneity-modified herd immunity" threshold has already been reached in some metropolitan areas of the U.S. Their model stands in contrast to many of the epidemiological models noted above that are based on the homogeneous assumption that basically every individual is equally liable to become infected and then to transmit their infection on to others.

The Illinois researchers define heterogeneity as the biological and social susceptibility of individual members of the population to COVID-19 viral infection. Biological heterogeneity takes into account differences in such factors as the strength of immune responses, genetics, age, and comorbidities. Social heterogeneity reflects variations in the number of close contacts that each individual has with different people. Basically the more social a person is, the more likely they are to get infected early in the epidemic and then become immune. The researchers combine biological and social heterogeneity to derive what they call an immunity factor.

The team tests their model on real-world empirical data from hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy and daily deaths from New York City and Chicago to figure out changes over time in the effective reproduction number for the virus in those cities. The effective reproduction number is the number of people to whom an individual can transmit infection at any specific time, and it changes as more of the population becomes immunized through either infection or vaccination. In addition, the effective reproduction number is affected by people's behaviors such as social distancing and widespread mask-wearing.

Taking the effects of biological and social heterogeneity on COVID-19 transmissibility, the researchers calculate that the herd immunity threshold is likely somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the population. According to recent reports, more than 20 percent of New York City residents have probably been infected with the coronavirus.

Seeking to see what might happen this fall, the researchers model possible outcomes of the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in New York City and Chicago. They consider what they call a "worst-case scenario" in which all current mitigation efforts are fully relaxed and bars, theaters, and restaurants open with negligible social distancing and mask-wearing. Their heterogeneity-modified model projects virtually no second wave of COVID-19 cases in New York City which indicates that herd immunity has likely been achieved there.

On the other hand, they calculate that Chicago has not passed the herd immunity threshold. Nevertheless, the effects of biological and social heterogeneity would still result in a substantial reduction of the magnitude of the second wave there, even under the worst-case scenario. The possible good news is that their results suggest "that the second wave can be completely eliminated in such medium-hit locations [as Chicago], if appropriate and economically mild mitigation measures are adopted, including e.g. mask wearing, contact tracing, and targeted limitation of potential super-spreading events, through limitations on indoor bars, dining and other venues."

Based on data from late May, researchers also calculate that most states were then still far away from reaching their heterogeneity-modified herd immunity thresholds. However, this summer's surge in COVID-19 cases may have brought some states closer to herd immunity. While the coronavirus may not just fade away, these calculations imply that the U.S. has a good chance to avoid a potentially disastrous second wave this fall if the public maintains reasonable social distancing and mask-wearing efforts."

Minneapolis Law Preventing Business Owners from Protecting Their Own Property Backfires Horribly

It’s no surprise that preventing business owners from protecting their own property hasn’t beautified the streets of Minneapolis 

By Brad Polumbo of FEE. Excerpt:

"Yet even in the face of wanton destruction and violence, city ordinances are preventing Minneapolis business owners from protecting themselves and their property. As reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the city currently bans exterior security shutters. These are the type of shutters they pull down over a mall storefront when it closes, that would make it much harder to break in and loot it. They also prevent windows from being broken, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace.

Why are security shutters banned in Minneapolis? Because city officials say they “cause visual blight,” and “create the impression that an area is ‘unsafe’ and ‘troublesome.’”

Now, many business owners are running up against this regulation as they seek to protect their reopened stores from future flare-ups of violence. (The earlier riots destroyed at least 1,500 Minneapolis businesses.) Liquor store owner John Wolf saw his store looted after rioters broke in through his windows and stole more than $1 million in alcohol. He’s fuming at the city regulations that stop him from protecting his property.

“Times have changed," Wolf told the Star-Tribune. "I am going to spend millions of dollars to bring my business back, and I don't want to buy 20 window panes and have them broken the first day. Property owners should have options on how to protect themselves."

Technically, business owners can apply for an exception to this rule. But it is incredibly difficult to get such a variance approved.

A city spokeswoman acknowledged as much, reportedly saying that “while someone is authorized to file a variance, it is challenging to meet the legal findings that are necessary to grant a variance from this type of provision.” The city says it has only ever received one request—which it rejected.

"I have never felt so vulnerable,” car repair shop owner Mark Brandow told the paper. He wanted to install security shutters on his property in July but was told by city officials he was ineligible to even apply for an exemption. They are only now letting him appeal. In the meantime, his storefront remains boarded up.

"People in the neighborhood have asked me to take the boards off because it is ugly," Brandow said. “But I don't need to be pretty. I'm going to leave it ugly until I get some satisfaction.”

This predictable consequence is part of the irony of the law's justification. The city’s anti-blight measure created more blight.

Well-intentioned Minneapolis officials banned security shutters, because they wanted their streets to be more visually appealing. Yet they failed to consider that store owners would only seek to install security shutters for a good reason—that is, if they were necessary.

We now see the results of this folly. Boarded-up stores, shattered windows, and permanent “closed” signs are far more likely to “cause visual blight” than security measures. The results of rioting run unchecked surely do far more to make an area seem “unsafe” and “troublesome” than metal security shutters.

So once again, we see sweeping regulation backfire and have unintended consequences that achieve the exact opposite of their original goals. This is what FEE’s James Harrigan and Antony Davies dubbed the “Cobra Effect.”

They told the comical yet revealing tale of how an Indian city placed a bounty on cobras to try and solve their infestation problem, yet achieved the opposite result. Why?

At first, more people hunted cobras to get the bounty, and the cobra population decreased. Yet then individuals started breeding and raising cobras at home in order to get the bounty again. When the government cancelled the bounty because the population had seemingly declined, citizens released all the cobras they had been raising in their homes into the wild.

The end result was a worse infestation of cobras than the city had to begin with.

“Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended,” Harrigan and Davies wrote in explaining why the regulation failed.

So, it’s no surprise that preventing business owners from protecting their own property hasn’t beautified the streets of Minneapolis—it has left them in shambles."

New Thinking on Covid Lockdowns: They’re Overly Blunt and Costly

Blanket business shutdowns—which the U.S. never tried before this pandemic—led to a deep recession. Economists and health experts say there may be a better way. 

By Greg Ip of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Five months later, the evidence suggests lockdowns were an overly blunt and economically costly tool. They are politically difficult to keep in place for long enough to stamp out the virus. The evidence also points to alternative strategies that could slow the spread of the epidemic at much less cost. As cases flare up throughout the U.S., some experts are urging policy makers to pursue these more targeted restrictions and interventions rather than another crippling round of lockdowns.

“We’re on the cusp of an economic catastrophe,” said James Stock, a Harvard University economist who, with Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina and others, is modeling how to avoid a surge in deaths without a deeply damaging lockdown. “We can avoid the worst of that catastrophe by being disciplined,” Mr. Stock said."

"Prior to Covid-19, lockdowns weren’t part of the standard epidemic tool kit, which was primarily designed with flu in mind.

During the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, some American cities closed schools, churches and theaters, banned large gatherings and funerals and restricted store hours. But none imposed stay-at-home orders or closed all nonessential businesses. No such measures were imposed during the 1957 flu pandemic, the next-deadliest one; even schools stayed open.'

"Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong set early examples of how to stop Covid-19 without lockdowns. Their reflexes trained by SARS in 2003, MERS and avian flu, they quickly cut travel to China, introduced widespread testing to isolate the infected and traced contacts. Their populations quickly donned face masks. 

Sweden took a different approach. Instead of lockdowns, it imposed only modest restrictions to keep cases at levels its hospitals could handle.

Sweden has suffered more deaths per capita than neighboring Denmark but fewer than Britain, and it has paid less of an economic price than either, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Sweden’s current infection and death rates are as low as the rest of Europe’s."

"By March, it was too late for the U.S. to emulate the test-and-trace strategy of east Asia. The CDC had botched the initial development and distribution of tests, and limited testing capacity meant countless infections went undetected for months."

" Some experts think it takes less than 81% of a population to reach herd immunity. Nonetheless, such predictions helped persuade leaders in Britain and the U.S. to lock down.

Yet at the outset, their goals were unclear, a confusion aggravated by the multitude of terms used. Officials sometimes said their goal was “bending” or “flattening the curve,” which originally meant spreading infections over time so the daily peak never overwhelmed hospitals. At other times they described their aims as “mitigation” or “containment” or “suppression,” often interchangeably.

“There have been few attempts to truly define the goal, and partly it’s because policy makers and epidemiologists haven’t thought well enough about the vocabulary to define what they mean or want,” said Dr. Mina, the Harvard epidemiologist."

"R value”: how many people each infected person goes on to infect."

"mitigation generally aims for an R of just above one, while suppression aims for an R of below one.

The U.S. never resolved “whether we were going for mitigation or suppression,” said Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate economist. Mitigation, he said, meant accepting hundreds of thousands of additional deaths to achieve herd immunity, which no leaders were willing to embrace. But total suppression of the disease “doesn’t make sense unless you’re going to stick with it as long as it takes.”"

"Dr. Mina of Harvard said the U.S. at the outset could have chosen to prioritize the economy, as Sweden did, and accept the deaths, or it could have chosen to fully prioritize health by staying locked down until new infections were so low that testing and tracing could control new outbreaks, as some northeastern states such as Rhode Island did.

Most of the U.S. did neither. The result was “a complete disaster. We’re harming the economy, waffling back and forth between what is right, what is wrong with a slow drift of companies closing their doors for good,” Dr. Mina said."

"“Emphasize the reopening of the highest economic benefit, lowest risk endeavors,” said Dr. Mina.

Social distancing policies, for instance, can take into account widely varying risks by age. The virus is especially deadly for the elderly. Nursing homes account for 0.6% of the population but 45% of Covid fatalities, says the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a free market think tank. Better isolating those residents would have saved many lives at little economic cost, it says.

By contrast, fewer children have died this year from Covid-19 than from flu. And studies in Sweden, where most schools stayed open, and the Netherlands, where they reopened in May, found teachers at no greater risk than the overall population. This suggests reopening schools outside of hot spots, with protective measures, shouldn’t worsen the epidemic, while alleviating the toll on working parents and on children.

If schools don’t reopen until next January, McKinsey & Co. estimates, low-income children will have lost a year of education, which it says translates into 4% lower lifetime earnings.

Research by Dr. Mina and others has shown that “super-spreader” events contribute disproportionately to infections, in particular dense indoor gatherings with talking, singing and shouting, such as at weddings, sporting events, religious services, nightclubs and bars.

Bars and restaurants accounted for 16% of Covid-19 clusters (five or more cases) in Japan; workplaces, just 11%. Bars, restaurants and casinos accounted for 32% of infections traced to multiple-case outbreaks in Louisiana."

"The German city of Jena in early April ordered residents to wear masks in public places, public transit and at work. Soon afterward, infections came to a halt. Comparing it to similar cities, a study for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics estimated masks reduced the growth of infections by 40% to 60%."

"a universal mask mandate in the U.S. could now save 5% of gross domestic product by substituting for more onerous lockdowns. 

Some epidemiologists and economists argue ramped-up testing could enable the economy to reopen safely without a vaccine. Mr. Romer estimates the U.S. could restore $1,000 in economic activity for every $10 spent on tests.

Dr. Mina pointed to a paper-strip test anyone can use to detect the virus in a sample of saliva in minutes. It is less accurate but far faster and cheaper than sending samples to labs, he said. If 50% to 60% of the population in hot spots took such a test every other day, the disease could be suppressed, he said.

Dr. Mina’s and Mr. Stock’s team has designed a “smart” reopening plan based on contact frequency and vulnerability of five demographic groups and 66 economic sectors. It assumes most businesses reopen using industry guidelines on physical distancing, hygiene and working from home; schools reopen; masks are required; and churches, indoor sports venues and bars stay closed.

They estimated in June that this would result in 335,000 fewer U.S. deaths by the end of this year than if all restrictions were immediately lifted. But they say the plan also would leave economic output 10% higher than if a second round of lockdowns were imposed.'

"When cases soared, Republican Gov. Douglas Ducey (Arizona) resisted reimposing restrictions or requiring masks. He then eventually allowed cities to require masks, ordered bars, gyms, movie theaters and water parks to close and told restaurants to operate at no more than 50% capacity. Gatherings of more than 50 people were prohibited and masks strongly encouraged. But he didn’t lock down the entire state. Cases and hospitalizations have since fallen sharply to early May levels, or lower."

Economics show why politicians' mask mandates don't work

By Steven Horwitz and Donald J. Boudreaux.

"Most economic analysis assumes that people reap all the benefits and bear all the costs of their decisions. But what happens when that’s not true? In particular, what happens when some of the costs of our decisions fall on the shoulders of others? This question is at the heart of the debate over mask mandates.

Refusal to wear a mask creates what economists call a “negative externality.” We impose (externalize) some of the costs of our actions on non-consenting others. If I am contagious with the novel coronavirus, my refusal to wear a mask imposes costs on those around me.

A classic example of negative externalities is air pollution. And unmasked COVID-19 carriers do actually pollute the air as did 19th-century smokestacks: In both cases, costs are inflicted on non-consenting others. The economist’s blackboard solution is to tax polluters just enough to give them incentives to behave as they would if they were to take into account the welfare of all who breathe the air.

While elegant and successful on the blackboard, however, this solution might well backfire in reality. That’s because the blackboard solution assumes that private actors are self-interested, yet it assumes that political actors are conversely concerned with only the public interest and not their own. Of course, experience teaches us that politicians are just as self-interested as are the rest of us — including polluters.

Politicians act in ways that win them votes, whether or not such actions truly promote the public welfare in reality.

With actual pollution policy, taxes and regulations are not designed to reduce pollution to “optimal” levels. Instead, by imposing mandates that fall with disproportionate costliness on smaller firms when compared to larger firms, real-world environmental policy too often is used to shield large and politically influential firms from the competition of smaller rivals. This, ironically, results in net harm to society — a negative externality.

Economists who fail to account for political self-interest in their models of the “best” policy should not be surprised when the actual policy turns out to be a failure.

And so it is with the call to address the negative externality of virus contagion with a mask mandate. This mandate, like a tax on polluters, forces mask wearers to bear additional costs that hopefully capture the full social costs of their decision. In theory, that should discourage people from going maskless. Or so says the blackboard solution.

But as with actual pollution policy, we cannot assume that the political process will produce a mask mandate that resembles what economists might draw on the blackboard. First, we have to ask what the actual gains from the mandate are likely to be, just as we have to be realistic about just how much pollution an actual tax would discourage. With masks, the question is how mandates work when compared to the next best alternative. How many more people would use masks if they are mandated versus simply relying on strong social pressure and private sector no-mask, no-service rules? It might not be many.

Second, we must think through the costs. In the same way that empowering politicians to solve pollution does not automatically produce the black-and-white results on the economist’s chalkboard, mask mandates might also have unintended negative consequences. By creating more opportunities for encounters between law enforcement and the citizenry, mask mandates create yet one more way for authorities to harass the relatively powerless. We’ve already seen that mandates are disproportionately enforced against people and communities of color.

Especially in the current political environment, these costs are not to be taken lightly.

We all want to stop the spread of COVID, and mask wearing is key to achieving that goal. But, in contrast to mandates, the more decentralized and nuanced processes of social pressure and rules created by private owners do not carry with them the use of force and the potential for abuse that comes with a government-enforced requirement.

Avoiding mandates would also allow individuals and firms to experiment — and discover the best ways to provide the protection that they and their customers, friends, or families desire. With a disease that is significantly riskier for some than others, one-size-fits-all mask mandates do not necessarily fit us all.

Steven Horwitz is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise at Ball State University. Donald J. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program at GMU’s Mercatus Center."

Good News from Georgia (so maybe it did not open too soon)

By David Henderson.

"Start with the state’s economy, which had a relatively low jobless rate of 7.6% in July. Construction was never shut down, and schools in much of the state are opening for classroom instruction. The state expected a budget shortfall of $1 billion for the year but the actual deficit was $210 million. Mr. Kemp says sales tax revenue is rebounding and the state hasn’t exhausted its $700 million reserve fund.

This is from a Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Georgia’s Pandemic Progress,” August 24, 2020 (electronic) and August 25 (print).

Recall all the flak that Governor Brian Kemp got for opening too soon. Well, it paid off."

Bjorn Lomborg responds to Stiglitz on climate change

NY Times letter to the editor.

"To the Editor:

Reviewing my book, “False Alarm,” in the Aug. 9 issue, Joseph E. Stiglitz misses its main argument: Climate change is a real, man-made and substantial problem. For instance, the U.N. Climate Panel estimates that hurricanes might become fewer, but fiercer, resulting in more damages.

The total negative climate impact is estimated by climate economics, spearheaded by the only climate economist to win a Nobel, William Nordhaus from Yale University. Studies show that while the cost of stronger hurricanes will rise, resilience from richer societies will counteract this effect. By 2100, one highly quoted Nature article suggests that fiercer hurricanes will cost the world 0.02 percent of G.D.P. Similarly, climate will mostly make agriculture harder, although adaptation will mitigate this impact. The largest empirical study finds the total cost by 2100 at 0.26 percent of G.D.P. Adding up these and many other costs, we can come to a total cost of unmitigated climate change by 2100 of about 3 percent of G.D.P.

That makes climate change a problem, but it seems counter to much end-of-world media coverage. That is because most climate stories are told without realistic, moderating effects. The recent headlines that 187 million people will be flooded by 2100 assumes no adaptation. With realistic adaptation, the actual number is 600 times lower.

Climate policies are also costly. Cutting 80 percent of the E.U. emissions by 2050 will cost 5 percent of G.D.P. Going net-zero, as proposed by the presidential candidate Joseph Biden, has been independently assessed by only one nation, New Zealand. It found the cost would be at least 16 percent of G.D.P.

The fundamental insight from climate economics is that we need to endure both the cost of climate damage and climate policy damage. Cutting too little carbon makes the world endure higher total costs, but similarly, cutting too much will lead to more total suffering.

I take issue with many other aspects of Stiglitz’s central argument. Crucially, in his rush to rubbish my book, its central point, with which I think Stiglitz would agree, gets lost: Since many climate policies are inefficient, we should be careful to tackle climate change with smart and effective policies like a carbon tax, green innovation and adaptation.

Bjorn Lomborg
Prague"

Keynesians expected 15% unemployment in 1946. The actual figure was 3.9%

By Richard Vedder. Excerpts:

"In the middle of the fighting, America’s leading Keynesian economist, Alvin Hansen of Harvard, said: “When the war is over, the government cannot just disband the Army, close down munitions factories, stop building ships, and remove economic controls.” That’s precisely what happened with almost no notice.

When the sudden end of combat became apparent in late August 1945, economist Everett Hagen predicted that the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 1946 would be 14.8%. Millions of military personnel did become jobless within months and defense spending plummeted, putting more out of work. In June 1946 federal employment was almost precisely 10 million less than a year earlier. Yet the sharp rise in overall unemployment didn’t occur. The total unemployment rate for 1946 was 3.9%—almost precisely the same rate the U.S. had this February before the pandemic’s effects were felt.

Part of the reason was that some workers in the war effort wanted to revert to their civilian roles as parents, housewives and students, so the supply of labor fell. But just as critically, market adjustments prevented massive joblessness. Unemployment exists when the quantity of labor supplied exceeds the quantity demanded at prevailing wage levels. To alleviate unemployment, real wages (adjusted for changes in worker productivity) need to fall. That happened in 1946, aided by rising productivity as resources moved from public to more-efficient private uses, with fewer wage and price controls."

"today, Washington has chosen to fight unemployment with deficit spending, deploying various stimulus efforts and unprecedented massive lending to private borrowers at extremely low interest rates. None of that happened after World War II; monetary growth actually slowed from wartime levels. Yet the economy prospered."

Italian government's takeover of the nation’s highways sends a troubling message to investors

See Italy Draws a Line Under Genoa Tragedy, Shunting Aside the Benettons by Elisabetta Povoledo of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"For Five Star, the accord is a political triumph, a trophy to exhibit to its dwindling supporters ahead of elections in September in the Liguria region, where Genoa is the capital. But some critics say that the ways Autostrade’s contract was changed by the government has sent a troubling message to potential investors in a country that has long shown itself capricious about business rules.

There was also the question of whether the government was in fact up to running an aging highway and infrastructure system badly in need of investment — one of the reasons its management had been privatized in the first place."

"One of the biggest obstacles to wresting Autostrade from the Benettons was that their original contract stipulated that the government pay them out if the agreement was terminated before its scheduled end in 2038.

That would have required the government to pay Autostrade some 20 billion euros, around $23.6 billion, to go away — a fact that drew considerable outrage in Italy when it came to light in the tragedy’s aftermath.

The Five Star government’s remedy was simply to pass a law in December — without negotiating with the company — that vastly diminished the payout, reducing it to about seven billion euros."

"“The way the whole story was managed, in my view, still leaves some big questions as for any future government intervention on regulated businesses,” Lorenzo Codogno, former chief economist of the Italian treasury and currently of LC Macro Advisors, wrote in a note."

"“As it is, Italy is widely perceived as unreliable because of its inefficient bureaucracy and slow tribunals, not to mention high taxes and sudden changes in industrial and regulatory policies,” said Marco Sebastiani, an economics professor at Tor Vergata University in Rome.

But the government sent an even more ominous message by issuing laws modifying its contracts with Autostrade, “changing the rules while the game was still being played,” he said."

"In the end, what emerges, said Mr. Mingardi of the Bruno Leoni think tank, is “that in Italy, you do business only if you are a friend of the government, and at that point, it’s better to do business with the government.”"