End of an Era?

There are studies in the US that suggest that the coronavirus has spread much, much more than the official numbers indicate. A Stanford study, for example, suggested that the infection rate in a California county is 50 to 85 times higher than reported! Balaji Srinivasan questions that study:

“It would be wonderful news as it would imply we were much closer to herd immunity at a lower cost than people thought.”

Don’t believe something just because that’s what you want to hear, he warns. He then analyzes the study, its methodology, and asks many valid questions.

It’s one thing for individual studies to be wrong, but the US government has to use some model to decide on its course of action. Unfortunately, as Sharon Begley wrote, the model they picked seems totally wrong. You’d think the US would use a tried-and-tested epidemic model. Like the model with the long track record:

“The most established, dating back a century, calculates how many people are susceptible to a virus (in the case of the new coronavirus, everyone), how many become exposed, how many of those become infected, and how many recover and therefore have immunity (at least for a while).”

Or the model that relies on the power of computers:

“Newer, “agent-based models” are like the video game SimCity, but with a rampaging pathogen: using computing power unimagined even a decade ago, they simulate the interactions of millions of individuals as they work, play, travel, and otherwise go about their lives.”

But no, the US government went with the IHME model. The IHME model takes data/trends of other countries and cities, from Wuhan to Italy:

“Then (to oversimplify somewhat) it finds where U.S. data fits on that curve. The death curves in cities outside the U.S. are assumed to describe the U.S., too, with no attempt to judge whether countermeasures —lockdowns and other social-distancing strategies — in the U.S. are and will be as effective as elsewhere, especially Wuhan.”

The IHME predictions aren’t even close on daily death rates, and yet that’s the model the US government is using for the big picture plan.

Wondering why the US is sticking with the IHME model? Well, it reduced the expected death toll down from 2,40,000 deaths to 70,000. Yes, they have decreased the expected death count, at a time when nothing in the daily trends shows signs of a slowdown in new cases per day… It makes you wonder whether people so desperate for good news, that the worst is over, that things aren’t as bad as they seemed, that they’ll jump at any model that says so?

Weirdly, the US doesn’t seem to have any coherent strategy, writes Ed Yong:

“The White House either has no strategy or has chosen not to disclose it. Without a unifying vision, governors and mayors have been forced to handle the pandemic themselves.”

Isn’t it almost surreal to see Indian politicians so united on the coronavirus front?

Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, acknowledges the failure of the West:

“Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade… The harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared… So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.”

He points at America’s inability to “build” rapidly, even in response to the crisis:

“We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials… We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine.”

See the contrast that with how quickly China built hospitals in Wuhan? But why can’t the West build anything now? Because all manufacturing was outsourced to China, and now the West cannot become a production powerhouse overnight. And that’s without even getting into the other, related problem that the West faces: the medical supply chain traces back to China and India, both of which halted or reduced exports.

If lockdowns are necessary, you need to transfer money to the needy during that period. For America, the problem isn’t the lack of money:

“Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers. The federal government just passed a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package in two weeks!”

Rather, the problem is in the lack of a system to transfer money to people:

“In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays.”

While India has such a system based on Aadhar. That was the one usage of Aadhar that all political parties were OK with!

All of which is why I wonder more and more… World War II was the event that marked the end of European hegemony and the beginning of the dominance of America and USSR. Will coronavirus be the event that marks the end of American hegemony, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the beginning of China’s dominance?