Strategic-Culture:

Germany’s federal government and mainstream media are engaged in damage control after a report that challenges the established Corona narrative leaked from the interior ministry.

Some of the report key passages are:

• The dangerousness of Covid-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level.

• The people who die from Corona are essentially those who would statistically die this year, because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with any random everyday stress (including the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation).

• Worldwide, within a quarter of a year, there has been no more than 250,000 deaths from Covid-19, compared to 1.5 million deaths [25,100 in Germany] during the influenza wave 2017/18.

• The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.

• A reproach could go along these lines: During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News.

So far, so bad. But it gets worse.

The report focuses on the “manifold and heavy consequences of the Corona measures” and warns that these are “grave”.

More people are dying because of state-imposed Corona-measures than they are being killed by the virus.

The reason is a scandal in the making:

A Corona-focused German healthcare system is postponing life-saving surgery and delaying or reducing treatment for non-Corona patients.

Slate Star:

How does this compare to the US as a whole? The National Center For Health Statistics says that the average American spends $11,000 on health care. This suggests that the average American spends between five and ten times more on health care than the average Amish person.

How do the Amish keep costs so low? R&D (plus a few other sources) identify some key strategies.

First, the Amish community bargains collectively with providers to keep prices low. This isn’t unusual – your insurance company does the same – but it nets them better prices than you would get if you tried to pay out of pocket at your local hospital. This article gives some examples of Amish getting sticker prices discounted from between 50% to 66% with this tactic alone; Medicare gets about the same.

Second, the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is “administrative expenses”, and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies’ attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this. 

But can this really be the reason Amish healthcare is cheaper? When insurance companies negotiate with providers, patients are on the side of the insurances; when insurance companies get good deals (eg a deal of zero dollars because the insurance has scammed the hospital), the patient’s care is cheaper, and the insurance company can pass some of those savings down as lower prices. If occasionally scamming providers meant insurance companies had to pay more money total, then they would stop doing it. My impression is that the real losers here are uninsured patients; absent any pressure to do otherwise, hospitals will charge them the sticker price, which includes the dealing-with-insurance-scams fee. The Amish successfully pressure them to waive that fee, which gets them better prices than the average uninsured patient, but still doesn’t land them ahead of insured people.

Third, Amish don’t go to the doctor for little things. They either use folk medicine or chiropractors. Some of the folk medicine probably works. The chiropractors probably don’t, but they play a helpful role reassuring people and giving them the appropriate obvious advice while telling the really serious cases to seek outside care. With this help, Amish people mostly avoid primary care doctors. Holmes County health statistics find that only 16% of Amish have seen a doctor in the past year, compared to 54% of English.

Konrad Hinsen:

But the main message of this letter is something different: it’s about your role in this story. That’s of course a collective you, not you the individual reading this letter. It’s you, the software engineering community, that is responsible for tools like C++ that look as if they were designed for shooting yourself in the foot. It’s also you, the software engineering community, that has made no effort to warn the non-expert public of the dangers of these tools. Sure, you have been discussing these dangers internally, even a lot. But to outsiders, such as computational scientists looking for implementation tools for their models, these discussions are hard to find and hard to understand. There are lots of tutorials teaching C++ to novices, but I have yet to see a single one that starts with a clear warning about the dangers. You know, the kind of warning that every instruction manual for a microwave oven starts with: don’t use this to dry your dog after a bath. A clear message saying “Unless you are willing to train for many years to become a software engineer yourself, this tool is not for you.”

As a famous member of your community famously said, software is eating the world. That gives you, dear software engineers, a lot of power in modern society. But power comes with responsibility. If you want scientists to construct reliable implementations of models that matter for public health decisions, the best you can do is make good tools for that task, but the very least you must do is put clear warning signs on tools that you do not want scientists to use – always keeping in mind that scientists are not software engineers, and have neither the time nor the motivation to become software engineers.

Ben Evans:

The thread through all of this is that we don’t know what will happen, but we do know what could happen – we don’t know the answer, but we can at least ask useful questions. The key challenge to any assertion about what will happen, I think, is to ask ‘well, what would have to change?’ Could this happen, and if it did, would it work? We’re always going to be wrong sometimes, but we can try to be wrong for the right reasons. The point that Pauli was making in the quote I gave at the beginning is that a theory might be right or wrong, but first it has to rise to the level of being a theory at all. So, do you have a theory?

SoftBank Group.

Mark Johnson:

‘Something we’ve never seen before’: Scientists still trying to understand baffling, unpredictable coronavirus

ProPublica:

Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.

John Diedrich, Devi Shastri ,  Madeline Heim ,  Daphne Chen:

What we’ve learned about how to protect yourself from coronavirus in reopened Wisconsin

Tyler Cowen:

Let’s say its 1990, and you are proposing an ambitious privatization plan to an Eastern bloc county, and your plan assumes that the enacting government is able to stay on a non-corrupt path the entire time.

While your plan probably is better than communism, it probably is not a very good plan.  A better plan would take sustainability and political realities into account, and indeed many societies did come up with better plans, for instance the Poland plan was better than the Russia plan.

It would not do to announce “I am just an economist, I do not do politics.”  In fact that attitude is fine, but if you hold it you should not be presenting plans to the central government or discussing your plan on TV.  There are plenty of other useful things for you to do.  Or the uni-disciplinary approach still might be a useful academic contribution, but still displaced and to be kept away from the hands of decision-makers.

Nor would it do to claim “I am just an economist.  The politicians have to figure the rest out.”  They cannot figure the rest out in most cases.  Either stand by your proposed plan or don’t do it.  It is indeed a proposal of some sort, even if you package it with some phony distancing language.

Instead, you should try to blend together the needed disciplines as best you can, consulting others when necessary, an offer the best plan you can, namely the best plan all things considered.