Reflections on the End of RBC, Part II: A Personal Perspective on the Pains and Joys of Blogging

This is the second of my three reflections made during this, the last month of RBC’s existence. The first was devoted to Mark Kleiman as a blogger. This one is devoted to my own experience as a blogger. I stipulate at the outset that this reflection may only be of interest to me, but one of the joys of blogging is that you can write posts even if the only person who will benefit is yourself.

How I Got Here and What I Did

I am not sure when I started reading RBC, but it was likely around 2008. Mark already had a strong stable of contributors then (Michael O’Hare, Andy Sabl, Jonathan Zasloff, and Harold Pollack were regulars), in addition to indefatiguably producing his own content. I learned things about public policy regarding crime, drugs, and health from reading RBC that were helpful to me in my work as Senior Drug Policy Advisor in the Obama White House. During my Washington days I also fed Mark some stories and trial balloons that he riffed on in these pages.

When my sabbatical year ended and I moved back to Palo Alto, Mark generously asked me if I wanted to join his crew. He described RBC as a “blogger’s blog” that had a medium sized following — way more than most blogs but way less than the big beasts. But he also said, correctly, that RBC’s work was picked up frequently by national bloggers and traditional media outlets (i.e., in the emerging politics and policy-focused blogosphere, RBC was The New Republic or The Economist rather than Time Magazine or the New York Times). My first post was in August of 2010 and explained my decision to accept Mark’s invitation.

I got into the rhythm of blogging pretty quickly and was active here until Spring of 2014, when I largely moved to Washington Post’s Wonkblog. One thing I worked out over my time at RBC was that more posts = more visitors to the blog. Given that, and the fact that I enjoy writing and even find it relaxing, I wrote a lot during my time here: in one 12 month period, I penned 60% of all RBC posts (to be clear, no one else was skiving off, I just wrote a lot). Despite the fact that some of what I wrote was hot garbage, the expansion of content in that period translated into a significant growth in readership. With I hope pardonable vanity, I am proud to have been a part of the crew that gave this site its biggest audience, not least because that readership growth helped attract Washington Monthly magazine to partner with us in a co-publishing arrangement beginning in 2012 that increased our readership even more (although as I wrote in my reflection on Mark, building an audience from scratch as Mark did is infinitely harder than growing the audience of an existing platform).

Pains and Joys of Blogging Continue reading “Reflections on the End of RBC, Part II: A Personal Perspective on the Pains and Joys of Blogging”

Heroes

The hero of Midway was not like Achilles.

Roland Emmerich’s Midway is on Amazon Prime, so I watched it.  As you would expect from the director of Independence Day, it’s a watchable, technically adept war movie at a Boys’ Own Paper level of subtlety and depth. If you are looking for an exploration of the stresses of command – Nimitz’ acceptance of a critical battle with no advantage of forces, only the edge of surprise – or of front-line combat, you will be disappointed. This is not an RBC recommendation.

Richard Halsey Best

But it does appear to be historically accurate. The events of Midway are sufficiently dramatic not to need embroidery. They even supplied an unambiguous real hero, Lt. Cdr. Richard Halsey Best, the dive-bomber pilot who scored hits on two Japanese carriers in the same day, the one in the Akagi’s hangar dooming the ship.

In the film, Best is played by English actor Ed Skrein as the archetypal talented bad boy who makes good on the day, a clone of the Tom Cruise character in Top Gun and similar action heroes. This characterisation by Emmerich reinforces a narrow stereotype. Hollywood does not always follow this – from Marshal Will Kane in High Noon to the portrayal of pacifist Marine paramedic Desmond Doss in Mel Gibson’s surprising Hacksaw Ridge – but it does so often enough for the stereotyping charge to carry weight.

It’s worth asking whether the portrayal of Best is true to life. It’s not inherently implausible; military pilots, like other combatants, can be nerveless daredevils. But it’s not the only possibility. Homer presents us in the Iliad with three different styles of warrior-hero: Achilles, the Top Chariot Fighter in the Hollywood mold, brave for glory and because he enjoys fighting; Hector, courageous out of honour and duty; and the calculating Odysseus, who is brave because he wants to win, to survive, and to go home to his wife and son. With striking realism, Homer has only the last survive.

So which of these three was closest to the real Richard Best? Surprisingly for such a pivotal and iconic figure, I could find no assessment of his character on the Internet. However, there are enough recorded facts to build a pretty good Identikit portrait.

1. Best married at age 22, and stayed married. I could find no reference to a divorce or remarriage.

2. As a young Navy pilot, he was picked in 1938 for a post as instructor at Pensacola. You do not choose reckless individualists for instructors, but men who can balance aggression and prudence, and can focus on the mission.

3. From Pensacola, he asked for a transfer to an operational dive-bomber squadron – not a fighter one. Fighter pilots win dogfights and glory; bomber pilots can sink ships and win battles. Why not torpedo bombers? Perhaps there was enough scuttlebutt about the obsolescence of the Douglas Devastator plane and its unreliable Mark 13 torpedo.

4. He was regularly promoted, and at Midway was a squadron commander under Air Group Commander Wade McCluskey. Emmerich’s film has them both given field promotions by Halsey in extremis, which is not plausible.

5. In the first attack on the Japanese fleet at Midway, most of the 31 American dive-bombers attacked the Kaga. McCluskey’s claimed orders to split forces were not received. Best noticed the mistake and, without orders, took his two wingmen, Lt. Kroeger and Ensign Weber, to attack the Akagi. Amazingly this tiny force not only survived but destroyed the carrier. Weber was killed in the successful afternoon attack on the Hiryu, but Kroeger survived the war and lived to 89.

6. Best suffered serious damage to his lungs during the day from a faulty ventilator and was hospitalised. He developed full TB, and was invalided out. He never flew for the Navy again – or, as far as I can find out, at all. You would think that if his passion was flying as such, a war hero and master pilot like Best could have found a way to stay in the air, at least for recreation.

7. After leaving the Navy in 1944, Best held two responsible desk jobs: “After discharge from the hospital, Best worked in a small research division of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. This division became part of the Rand Corporation in December 1948, where Best headed the security department until his retirement in March 1975” (Wikipedia). These do not look like sinecures. Both companies were important and unsentimental military contractors and prime targets for Soviet espionage. Running security for Rand may not have been physically demanding, but it demanded sharp wits and an eye for detail.

I don’t want to understate the sheer nerve required to put a warplane into a near-vertical dive over an enemy warship firing at you with every gun it has, not to release your bomb until you are certain, and to pull out of the dive at the last second before crashing. Still, Best’s CV reads like Odysseus not Achilles to me. I think he risked his life twice on the same day not to show how brave he was, or even out of a high sense of duty, but because he was determined for the United States to win the war.

Corrections and additions welcome.

PS: There is of course a wider debate about heroism, as the coronavirus crisis reminds us daily. The classical Greek authors expanded the canon of heroism to women like Andromache, Cassandra and Antigone, and men like Orestes who struggle with a profound ethical dilemma. Hollywood should follow their example.

The coronavirus disaster in Brazil

Brazil should take the Imperial College models seriously.

This post is mainly intended for my Brazilian family and friends, since it’s too long for a Facebook post. Others may find it a change from their local tragedies.

Imagine a big country with an unqualified populist elected as President who compares the Covid-19 virus to the flu, has accused the media of hyping the risk for underhand political motives, challenges death statistics, picks a fight with the governor of the most populous state including its largest city, talks frequently of an early return to work, and disregards social distancing rules himself? Not the USA but Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. See also Wikipedia. Meanwhile the plague advances as desperate state governors declare uncoordinated lockdowns, and health care professionals complain of a shortage of masks and ventilators, well before any peak. Some drug kingpins are enforcing lockdown in their favela fiefdoms at gunpoint.

Remember that sickening moment on 9/11 when you realized that the collapsing skyscrapers were not from a disaster movie, but the horrifyingly real thing? That’s Brazil today.

Into this chaos step the high-minded foreign experts. On March 26, the industrious mathematical epidemiologists at Imperial College (Walker, Whittaker et multi) released their Report 12 (pdf) extending their scenarios from the UK and the USA, as in report 9, to 102 countries. The O Globo newspaper got hold of the data spreadsheet (xls here; extract for Brazil only by me here) and published what looks like an accurate summary. Judging by the Facebook posts of my Brazilian acquaintances, this was greeted with widespread incredulity. Let me try to persuade them to take it seriously.

To recap, the Imperial team modelled three main mitigation scenarios for this country of 212 million inhabitants. They put in various values of R from 2.4 to 3.3, and assumed social distancing would be about 40% effective . They define R thus: “R0 : Basic Reproduction number (average number of secondary infections by a typical infection in an unconstrained epidemic and wholly susceptible population).”

A – no mitigation at all:

  • total ultimate infections             183m – 188m
  • total deaths                                       908,000 – 1,152,000,
  • total critical hospitalizations    1,466,000
  • peak critical bed demand            470,000

B – social distancing (40%) only for the elderly:

  • total ultimate infections             92m- 121m
  • total deaths                                       271,000 – 530,000
  • total critical hospitalizations    359,000 – 703,000

C – social distancing (40%) for the entire population:

  • total ultimate infections             95m- 122m
  • total deaths                                       452,000 – 627,000
  • total critical hospitalizations   600,000 – 831,000

What to think of this?

1. It’s state-of-the-art professional modelling. The parameters are put in from the latest data, especially Chinese. Put in different parameters, and you get different results. But you can’t just make up your own parameters, you need a reason. A bigger number of asymptomatic carriers? Maybe; it lowers the total of infections in Scenario A, as you hit herd immunity sooner, but the higher pace of infection exacerbates the peak load on hospitals. Wishful thinking in the Trump/Bolsonaro style does not hack it.

2. The least reliable scenario is A, the disaster one in which no action is taken. This won’t happen, anywhere, for two opposite reasons. One: even if central governments fail, as in the USA, Mexico and Brazil, lower levels of government step in – less effectively, but they will act. If the worst comes to the worst, people will just self-isolate, as Isaac Newton did in the London bubonic plague of 1665. (Incidentally, this is why the “economy vs. public health” opposition is a false one. The economy tanks sooner or later, whatever the government does.) Two: a reason, this time on the bad side, for distrusting scenario A is that it does not allow for hospital collapse, which would be inevitable. Death rates would rocket, unpredictably. The model is benchmarked on the Chinese health care system which never faced such extreme loads.

3. The key conclusion of the Imperial reports is that mitigation isn’t enough, you have to go for energetic suppression to keep the health system from collapsing. Even the lowest Imperial mitigation scenario has over 2m hospitalisations in Brazil, 360,000 of them critical ones. Brazil has 415,000 hospital beds, just adequate for normal times. Any mitigation scenario leads to hospital collapse. Unfortunately they do not offer suppression scenarios, impossible for so many countries at once. So the Brazilian government has to put some work into this to avoid the catastrophe.

Stepping outside the report, there are now plenty of examples of successful suppression strategies.

Gold medal: Taiwan, silver medal: South Korea. These have not SFIK relied on fancy models at all but on the trusty Epidemics 101 playbook: test, track, isolate. The playbook was it seems first worked out for animal diseases before WWI. The part about “slaughter all the infected animals, dump the carcasses in a big pit, and burn the animal sheds” has been toned down for humans, but the take-no-prisoners attitude survives. One quarantine violator in Taiwan was fined $33,000. The Vice-President is an epidemiologist. I doubt if Brazil has the administrative capacity or social cohesion for this, and anyway it’s too late.

Second best is Europe. After a late start, most countries adopted strict lockdowns to drive R below 1 quickly. They are working. In Spain where I live, a state of emergency and national lockdown was declared on March 15. New deaths peaked on April 1. Cumulative deaths on that date stood at 10,003. Assume the curve is symmetrical, and total deaths will end up around 20,000. Scale that to Brazil, and you would get 99,000.

That would be a decent second-best outcome starting from now (cases 20,247, deaths 1,090). I’m afraid I don’t believe it. Spain has a competent and rational government and civil service, a first-world healthcare system, and a surprisingly deep reserve of social solidarity in spite of political divisions. Brazil has much lower levels of trust in government, very high inequality, and a healthcare system overstretched in normal times. In addition to these structural handicaps, it has, like the USA, unwisely elected an erratic and irrational President incapable of offering the example of steadiness and discipline required by the situation*, The country will IMHO be lucky to escape with under 200,000 deaths. It could easily be worse.

* Epidemic management is a Roman dictatorship of public health experts. What political leaders have to do is hand over the keys and make frequent sober and statesmanlike statements. A good number of quite ordinary politicians have shown themselves up to this: Xi Jinping, Moon Jae-in, Merkel, Conte, Sanchez, Cuomo, Newsom, even Matt Hancock, the previously unimpressive British Health Secretary. The failures are striking: Trump, Obrador, Bolsonaro, Abe.

Reflections on The End of RBC, Part I: Mark Kleiman as Blogger

In preparing to say goodbye to RBC, I have been spending time digging through the archives. In the process I have come up with some closing reflections that I will share here in our final month of existence. The first part is dedicated to RBC Founder Mark Kleiman as a blogger (I have written about my friend more generally here, this post is just about him as an RBCer).

The oldest post in RBC’s archive is this one, written by Mark on August 30, 2002. Mark started in a place of political alienation: he positively loathed the George W. Bush Presidency. Some people want to write; other people have to. I think at that historical moment Mark had to. In a previous century, he might have stamped out hand bills protesting the actions of Parliament or The King, but in 2002, the Internet was here and blogging was exploding as a written form. Cometh the medium, cometh the man.

My main feeling in looking at the early years of RBC’s archive is admiration of Mark’s work ethic and bloody minded persistence. Day after day he turned out post after post for a tiny audience. RBC was not a group blog but Mark Kleiman’s blog, and he was 100% responsible to keep it going. He pushed that rock uphill and slowly built a loyal audience. Even when Steve Teles and Michael O’Hare signed on a few years in, Mark was still the workhouse content producer.

I feel good about the fact that I was a core writer here when the RBC reached its largest audience (At least 250,000 unique readers a month), but going from no audience to 10,000 regular readers is a way bigger lift that going from 150,000 to 250,000. There were a zillion blogs when Mark was starting out that never hit that initial threshold of a loyal readership base, but Mark got there and then some entirely on his own.

This also highlights what a generous person he was. Many people who had labored so hard to create a platform and a following would not have shared it. But Mark offered RBC slots to dozens of writers over the years, letting them start out with a much bigger audience for their work than they could have attained without years of effort.

Mark also deserves praise for the range of substantive areas about which he blogged about in a thoughtful fashion. He is of course most well known for leading the only widely read English language blog that did serious drug policy analysis, but he also wrote intelligently about crime, politics, poverty, education, and a variety of other topics. I eulogized Mark at the American Society of Criminology last year by noting that he was really a 19th century intellectual rather than a 21st century social scientist: he didn’t stay confined to a discipline and didn’t rely much on complex statistics. Instead he used his roving mind and keen observational skills to make his points, and, he had enough chutzpah to think (usually correctly) that he could say something intriguing on virtually any topic.

At the same time, Mark was sometimes too undisciplined in his blogging, and indulged himself in rants or political attacks that didn’t advance the argument (Not that that was his purpose in those posts, he was I think venting). I wonder if it might explain a mystery of Mark Kleiman as a blogger: Why was it that so many of his equally successful contemporaries were hired by magazines and newspapers to be an inhouse blogger but Mark never was? It may be that the only blog that could hold Mark’s eclectic intellect, temperament, and sensibilities, was the one that he himself founded and ran.

The Reality-Based Community will Close its Doors at the End of this Month

Not an April Fool’s Day joke, we have been discussing the future of RBC internally since Mark Kleiman’s passing and have decided it’s time to close shop. We will have some final reflections from RBCers here in the month to come. In that spirit, I am re-upping this piece from early 2011 that still rings true to me about the role of this blog.

A slow day off of work combined with a fast new lap top (Xmas gift) and no hangover (I followed Mark’s suggestion) makes this a good day to blog. I better understand this medium than I did when I started, and though I remain ambivalent about whether I should keep blogging, there is no denying that I learn from the blogosphere, including RBC.

One of the things I have observed is that many political/public policy blogs are comfort food for a pool of regular readers. If you create a site called “immigrantsaredestroyingourcountry.com” or “legalizecocainenow.com” or “Allrepublicansareevilmonsters.com” you will over time accrue a readership, potentially a large one. Your role as a blogger is to repeat, in a thousand different ways, the message captured in your blog title. Your amen corner will then comment enthusiastically, over and over, in post after post that you are oh so right about what you think.

If such a blog strays from its message, the tell will be readers commenting “Hey, this blog is supposed to be advocating X and this post of yours seems to indicate that Y may be true”. And then, the ultimate insult from a comfort food seeker “This is the kind of post I would expect to see on blog Y”. The accusation isn’t that the blogger is wrong, but that the blogger is a traitor to the cause.

Whether providing political comfort food is right or wrong, it’s human nature to seek it out at least some of the time and that’s not going to change. But I thought it was worth saying that it is a feature and not a bug of RBC that if you read us for long you will encounter viewpoints and analyses with which you disagree (perhaps quite strongly).

When Mark Kleiman asked me to start blogging here, he knew there were things we didn’t agree about. And he didn’t say “You must support position Y, political party A, candidate Q” or anything else of that sort. He just asked me, as he asked a diverse range of people over the years, if I wanted to blog here and I said yes. Quincy Adams (ahem), Jonathan Zasloff, Amy Zegart, Robert Frank, Kelly Kleiman, Matthew Kahn, Steve Teles, James Wimberley, Lesley Rosenthal, Michael O’Hare, Bob Jesse, Andy Sabl and Harold Pollack have different knowledge bases and different points of view, which I consider all to the good.

I can tell from our comments that most RBC readers understand that there is no loyalty oath required to be a blogger here, nor an understanding that the posters must agree with each other. There is a shared commitment to evidence over opinion, as well as to civil debate, but that’s different than being monolithic on substance.

Very occasionally I get a comment along the lines of “This blog is supposed to advocate Y and you aren’t doing your part”. This makes it worth repeating that this isn’t a comfort food blog; that’s not our comparative advantage. Does this cost us readers? I am sure it does, but that doesn’t bother me and I assume it doesn’t trouble Mark either. The readers we keep are smart and intellectually curious, and those are the kind of people I want to spend my time around.

Do I wish that more people were interested in data, dialogue and potentially having their opinions proved wrong than are interested in comfort food? Broadly speaking, yes. But I hope this blog comforts those who have a taste for something other than comfort food.

Anglo-Saxon thought for the day

From The Battle of Maldon.

Dedicated to the exhausted army of doctors, nurses, and ancillary workers who have woken up in many countries to another endless day of struggle against a faceless epidemic. And particularly to those who relax reading Anglo-Saxon poetry.

From The Battle of Maldon, ca. 1000 CE. The Saxon war-leader Byrhtnoth has been killed and his band is losing the battle to the Viking invaders; some Saxons have run away. His old retainer Byrhtwold speaks to the remnant standing fast. Try reading it aloud to catch the alliteration. The letter þ is a voiced “th”. [Update: sound file on YouTube.]

Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,
mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað.

Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener,
Mood [mind, courage] the more, as our might lessens [lit: littles.].

Suitably, the text is incomplete, and breaks off before the battle ends. We don’t know who wins – then or now.

Warriors:

Then

 

Now

 

Newton self-isolates

Newton’s prism experiment retold.

As a way of putting enforced seclusion to good use, it’s hard to beat Newton’s optics.

You all know the story in outline. In 1665 the bubonic plague that devastated London reached Cambridge, where Newton was a freshly minted B.A. (Cantab.) He fled to his uncle’s farm in Lincolnshire. This is now called Woolsthorpe Manor, though it’s more the farmhouse of a prosperous yeoman. He took with him a pair of prisms, with which he destroyed the prevailing theory of colour with a devastating experiment. We all know that Newton discovered, or rediscovered, the colour spectrum using a glass prism placed in a beam of light. But the real breakthrough came from the second prism.

Brief flashback. This prevailing theory was a common-sense one. White sunlight passes through a stained-glass window. It becomes blue or red or yellow. It’s the medium, the stained glass, that gives the colour, right?  As Shelley wrote, 150 years later:

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.

Wrong.

The usual story is that Newton hid out in a barn. His own sketch of the experiment disproves this.

Barns don’t have small, square, high windows. Bedrooms do – like those on the first floor of the house. Glazed windows were gradually adopted in England in the course of the 17th century. As like as not, the bedrooms in the Newton farmhouse still only had stout wooden shutters to keep out the cold Lincolnshire winds: shutters with cracks in them.

The sketch clearly shows what Newton did. He placed prism 1 in a beam of sunlight passing through a crack or hole in the shutter, producing the familiar spectrum. Where did these colours spring from? Perhaps it was the medium again, the prism glass, as Descartes had proposed. Newton constructed a screen with a ladder of more holes to allow him to isolate the different colours. He placed prism 2 in the red, blue, .. light – and it stayed put. Schematically:

It doesn’t make sense that prism 1 would create colours and identical prism 2 do nothing to them. (To be quite sure you would need to replicate with prisms made from different sources of glass, but that was quickly done.) So the colours were in the light to begin with.

The illusion is white light, really a bundle of different colours. More disturbingly to our intuition, a perceived colour is a negative property. The stained glass absorbs all the other colours than the blue we see. Leaves are green because that wavelength is not absorbed by chlorophyll, which is tuned to blue and red.

It took Newton five years to write this all up into a full theory of optics. It was his 1672 paper on this that made him deservedly famous. Gravity came later (1687), though he started on that in the farmhouse too.

Go on. Crack string theory.

Ambroise Paré’s COVID advice

Look at emergency home nursing.

The surgeon to François Ier of France, Ambroise Paré, gave this classic statement of the doctor’s mission:

Guérir parfois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours.

In his day, there were few hospitals. Most people were born, went to their beds when they fell sick, recovered a few times, and finally died, all in their own homes. It wasn’t much different in 50,000 BC. Hospitals were for the few mobile categories: soldiers, seamen, merchants, pilgrims. Paré would have done most of his surgery in tents in the rear of the battlefield.

Florence Nightingale at Scutari – Shutterstock

The hospital, as a temple of scientific medicine, is a 19th-century invention. The Dr. House TV series offers an exaggerated but basically fair image of its ethos. The model is badly adapted to a massive epidemic of nearly identical cases. In parts of Lombardy, hospitals have been overwhelmed, and resorted to triage. The older arrivals with preexisting conditions have reportedly sometimes been left in corridors to die with minimal palliative care. Ethically, this is not really problematic; in human terms, it is horrific. The same is very likely to happen in many other countries, including the UK and the USA (here, report 9).

I am 73 with asthma. I therefore have a personal stake in this problem, which has started to arise in Madrid. The army are setting up large improvised field hospitals. This fixes the bed shortage, and I trust that crash programmes are under way to make respirators and masks, but you can’t create qualified nurses in a few weeks.

So you enlist unqualified ones. Go back to the 18th century, and ask family members to care for the sick at home. Patients who fail the hospital triage would be sent home with a Happy Care package, including an army or airline-issue respirator, a bottle of oxygen, a box of antibiotics and opioids, a bedpan, a one-page guide, and a Skype helpline.

Every medical professional from Florence Nightingale to Geoffrey House will be shocked by this unprofessional atavism. But the objections are readily answered.

1. Half or more will die! Sure. The basis of comparison is not best or even average hospital practice, but the horrid reality of the triage corridor. At the very least, the sick will die with more dignity and human warmth.

2. The potential carers have to go out to work. Not just now they don’t.

3. The patients will infect the carers. They are already infected.

4. Not every patient has potential home carers physically and mentally fit enough to do the job. Absolutely. Home nursing is only part of the solution. That’s why we also need the army field hospitals. I can’t guess the relative numbers here.

An additional twist to this plan is that there is a rapidly expanding cohort of asymptomatic or recovered people with immunity, who are potentially available to support others, though home nursing assistance among other ways. In Veneto province in Italy, which has tested heavily, about 8% of the population tests positive, two-thirds without symptoms or nearly so.

If it comes to such a choice for me, I would take the home solution over the corridor. I don’t know what Lu thinks.

I really would like to know what the heirs of Florence and Ambroise make of this. If  anything on these lines is the way forward, or even a last-ditch fallback, it has to be planned for.

De Long is wrong on coronavirus

If you are going to quarantine, do it soon.

It’s not often one gets the chance and obligation to say this. Brad DeLong :

Note to Self: Is there anything wrong with this analysis? With 14 deaths in the U.S., a 1% death rate, and 4 weeks between infection and death, that means that as of Feb 8 there were 1400 coronavirus cases in the United States. If it is doubling every seven days, then now about 22,000 people have and in the next week about 44,000 people in the U.S. will catch coronavirus. These numbers could be five times too big. These numbers could be five times too small. But with only 1 in 10,000 currently affected, it seems 4 or 5 weeks early to start imposing serious geographical quarantines …

No, no, no. R is not a function of the number of cases. It is only a function of herd immunity and the individual chance of transmission.

The condition for the decline and fall of the epidemic is lowering R below 1. There are two paths to this. Call them the Trump policy and the Xi policy.

Under the Trump policy of malign neglect, the virus spreads until most of the potential transmittees of the virus have recovered from it and are immune. Meanwhile, the cemeteries have filled up with those who didn’t recover. 200,000? 480,000? 1.7 million, if the hospitals collapse and the treatment is back to Black Death standards? The epidemic expires from satiety.

Under the Xi policy (also now the Moon, Conte, Sanchez, and Merkel policy), the state cuts the opportunities for transmission, including quarantines as well as contact tracing and mass preventive screening. The cost of this, direct and indirect, is fixed and independent of the number of cases. Imagine a perfect lockdown in which everybody stays in their house or flat, living out of tins by candlelight, for a fortnight: end of epidemic. This can’t be done perfectly of course, so real outcomes are a risk distribution, but you can get pretty close, as Singapore and Taiwan have shown. The death toll is still 1% or 1.6% or whatever of those infected.

It is lower the earlier you start the policy. Starting when the diagnosed cases are in the thousands, as seems to be the political trigger, looks as if it might limit ultimate deaths also to the thousands or tens of thousands. QED.

Lego clone army

A more picturesque way of looking at this is from the point of view of the virus. It’s a clone army of dumb replicants with no leader and a single mission: reproduce. For the Virus Army as a whole, a pandemic is a death ride. At the end of it they will all be dead, apart from the small source population living quietly in non-fatal parasitism with its animal hosts. The fun part is how many non-standard hosts they can kill along the way.

No zoom in on the virus commando that has infiltrated a single human host, you. The commando is doomed. In 14 days, either you are dead (end of viruses) or your immune system has destroyed them all and you are recovered (end of viruses). Their only hope for reproduction is for some members of the commando to jump ship and invade another disarmed host. The jumping ship is nearly always fatal, as the viruses can only survive a few hours outside a host. They have no independent motility and are dependent on cooperation by the hosts: handshakes, kisses, cough aerosols, unwiped door handles. Reduce that cooperation, and the survival odds for SEAL Team Virus drop to almost nothing. That, in essence, is the Xi policy: and it works.