Making Sense of COVID-19 (and Trying to Stay Calm)

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Update: More recent iterations are available:

Like most folks I know, I’ve been feeling increasingly stressed about the Coronavirus pandemic. I had done my best to educate myself and prepare, but I’ve been surprised by how scared and anxious I’ve been this past week.

Early on, my social media feed was invaluable at helping me understand what was happening. Now, it’s just causing me stress. Yesterday, I decided to try to limit my social media (and media) exposure. Instead, I would check the daily new cases graph once-ish a day, then just live my life. I’ve been primarily using worldometer, but I switch to The New York Times (which is updated more frequently and comes with news summaries) when I get antsy.

My reasoning was simple. Coronavirus is here in the U.S., and it’s spreading. (Because of lack of testing, we likely have many more cases than currently reported.) We missed our opportunity for containment, so now it’s all about mitigation. Most of the commentary doesn’t offer any real insight into how we’re actually doing in that regard, so I’m better off mostly ignoring it. The curve gives me real data on how we’re doing.

The problem is that it’s hard for me to gauge anything from this data other than that we’re on the growth-side of the curve, which I already know. I decided to map some additional data onto the curve to see if that helped. I looked at three other countries: China, South Korea, and Italy. China and South Korea have, by all accounts, handled things well. I’m not sure if Italy is handling things poorly, but — by all accounts — things are going poorly there. I figured that comparing these three data sets with the U.S. curve would give me a better sense of how we’re doing and what to possibly expect.

I looked at roughly a month of data for all four countries. Cases in South Korea, Italy, and the U.S. all started coming up around the same time, so I could actually use data from the same time period. Thing started blowing up in China roughly a month earlier, so I took the earlier data and mapped it onto the current time period. The key step I took that I haven’t seen in any other charts so far was to normalize the data by population (South Korea = 0.15; Italy = 0.19; U.S. = 1; China = 4.35).

Here’s what I came up with:

The orange curve is the U.S. data. The dotted line is a worst-case projection based on where we actually are based on death rate. (See Mona Chalabi’s excellent Instagram post, which uses analysis from Tomas Pueyo, for more on this.) I did not do a worst-case projection for South Korea (which could also be about 10 times off), Italy (which could be as much as 100 times off), or China (Mona didn’t include China in her graphic). I also didn’t represent the spike in China’s data that arose when they changed how they were testing, as it’s accounted for in the peak and subsequent data.

Here’s how I read this: China did an amazing job of managing the situation. South Korea had an awful spike, and somehow managed to turn it around. Italy — wow. Things are not good in Italy. Right now, we in the U.S. are doing okay, but it’s still very early, and it remains to be seen what our curve will look like. However, at least now I have some points of comparison.

Doing this exercise made me feel much better. Feedback (especially critiques and corrections) encouraged! Stay diligent, keep your (physical) distance, wash your hands, and take care of yourselves!

California Is the Poorest State in the Country

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I was born and bred in California, and I absolutely love it here. It is home, and there is nowhere else I’d rather be.

But California has its problems, and when I read articles full of breathless hubris like this one in Politico, I get concerned. The article states:

But while California has plenty of problems, from worsening wildfires to overpriced housing to that troubled bullet-train project that became the latest target of presidential mockery, there’s one serious hitch in the GOP plan to make California a symbol of Democratic dysfunction and socialistic stagnation: It’s basically thriving.

“California is doing awesome,” says Congressman Ted Lieu, an immigrant from Taiwan who co-chairs the policy and communications committee for the House Democratic Caucus. “It’s a beautiful, welcoming, environmentally friendly place that proves government can work. Who wants to run against that?”

California is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, up from eighth a decade ago. If it’s a socialist hellhole, it’s a socialist hellhole that somehow nurtured Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Oracle and Intel, not to mention old-economy stalwarts like Chevron, Disney, Wells Fargo and the Hollywood film industry. California firms still attract more venture capital than the rest of the country combined, while its farms produce more fruits, nuts and wine than the rest of the country combined. During the Great Recession, when the state was mired in a budget crisis so brutal its bond rating approached junk and it gave IOUs to government workers, mainstream media outlets were proclaiming the death of the California dream. But after a decade of steady growth that has consistently outpaced the nation’s, plus a significant tax hike on the wealthy, California is in much sounder fiscal shape; while federal deficits are soaring again, the state has erased its red ink and even stashed $13 billion in a rainy day fund.

Yes, California is a beautiful place, and we do a good job of trying to protect it. Yes, we are lucky to be the bread basket of the country, a function of our fertile land and climate, as well as the water we take from other places. Yes, we seemed to have recovered from our budget crisis… for now.

And yet, California continues to be the poorest state in the country, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account cost of living. Yes, that’s right. When I first read this, it surprised me too. And then it didn’t.

The Politico article cited above mentioned the housing problems here, but it doesn’t cite the poverty metrics. Most articles don’t. No one challenges the numbers, they just choose to ignore them. But being the poorest state in the country does not align with our values, and we need to reconcile this with all of the stuff that is great about this state.

The best explanation of the root causes responsible for many of our problems is California Crackup, by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul. I highly recommend it.