Chhota Pegs

Or, The Case of the Invisible Denominator I've been chatting with Jay Bhattacharya , Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, and co-author of a very thought-provoking piece on mortality rates under covid-19 . Briefly, these authors study incidence rates in three cases where either a full census of tests was conducted, as in the Italian town of  Vò in Padua, or where a random sample was drawn, as in Iceland. Using incidence rates for covid from these cases, they suggest that the fatality rate for covid is far lower than we think, or fear.   Going beyond these cases, the problem, of course, is a missing denominator: just how many are infected? Assuming we accurately know the deaths from covid-19 --- possibly not , but setting that aside --- the unknown denominator of actual cases moves us along an "isoquant" of fatality rates and contagion rates, which multiply out to the known deaths. The higher the contagion, the lower must be the fatality rate, for some given...

Migrants at Bandra Railway Station, Bombay, March 2020. Press Trust of India, On the 24th of March, the Government of India ordered a nationwide lockdown for 21 days as a preventive measure against the coronavirus. The lockdown restricts 1.3 billion people from leaving their home. Transport services are suspended. So are services, factories and educational institutions. The lockdown has generally met with approval from international institutions such as the WHO, and is in line with what is deemed appropriate in economically advanced countries. For instance, Francis Collins, Director of the US National Institutes of Health, writes : “ [W]hat we need most right now to slow the stealthy spread of this new coronavirus is a full implementation of social distancing.”  The framing in these countries is “lives versus economics,” and by and large it is the right one.  As Paul Krugman puts it   ( New York Times April 2), “ most job losses are inevitable, indeed necessary … we...