Thursday Throughput: The Heavy Price Of The Great Barrington Declaration Edition

Left to right: Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya at the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 2020. Photo by Taleed Brown, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

[ThTh1] In the ongoing quest to defend Florida’s handling of the pandemic, Jay Bhattacharya, one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which I attacked here, said this:

COVID-19 mortality in locked down California vs. free Florida by age group through Sept. 22, 2021 (latest CDC data).

If the lockdowns accomplished anything, they harmed the old without protecting the young.

Lockdown = Let It Drip. pic.twitter.com/dNj5I4nLiK

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) September 28, 2021

His point is that, if you correct for the older age of your typical Florida resident, the death rates in the two states are the same and therefore this vindicates a Great Barrington Declaration approach as opposed to lockdowns.

Now…never mind that Florida hasn’t actually used a Great Barrington Declaration approach. They’ve had restrictions, schools have resisted DeSantis’ edict against mask mandates and Florida has a decent vaccination rate. Never mind that California hasn’t done lockdowns; they’ve had restrictions and shelter-in-place but haven’t welded people into their home are anything. Never mind that the entire point of “flattening the curve” was that we would spread out cases so that hospitals did not get overwhelmed. Never mind that Dr. Bhattacharya, as is the Barrington disciple’s want, is cherry-picking two states. If you look at all 50 states, the pattern of red states having had a worse pandemic is glaringly obvious. Never mind that states with the worst overall death rates are either states that got hit early (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts) or red states that have resisted restrictions (Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama).

No, let’s focus particularly on this on little comparison — Florida and California. At first blush, this point seems correct, but consider this:

Both states were hit early on, although it should be remembered that California instituted COVID-19 restrictions immediately and managed to avoid the fate of New York, which was also hit early. California had a worse second wave. But since mass vaccination began early this year, the two states have diverged. On March 31, California had lost 58,000 people to the virus and Florida 34,000. Since then, California has lost 10,000 and Florida 20,000. And Florida is still piling up bodies. Now it’s possible the Delta wave will hit California harder at some point (although their case have fallen over the last two weeks). But at the rate we’re going, this comparison is only valid…as of today.

Note something else as well: the entire point of the Great Barrington Declaration was to keep the economy strong. But California’s economy has actually done slightly better than Florida’s, at least in terms of GDP growth. This reinforces a point that has been vindicated over and over: the best way to preserve the economy is to control the virus because, Great Barrington Declaration advocates notwithstanding, people aren’t going to risk a serious and potentially fatal disease to get a burger.

Ultimately, I feel like this is grasping at straws. It will be years before we know for certain what worked and what didn’t. And it is always important to emphasize that we can’t judge a pandemic response until the pandemic is over (as we saw with the DeSantis praise of earlier this year). But the data does not show that a Great Barrington Declaration approach saves the economy without costing lives. It shows that it extracts a heavy price on both.

[ThTh2] I mentioned the rabies vaccine in my Regeneron post. Here’s how I know about that vaccine. A few years ago, my wife and son woke up to find a bat in the house. The doctors recommended they get the rabies sequence since the bat fled and could not be tested. My daughter and I were out of town, but got the sequence in solidarity with them. It wasn’t bad. The immunoglobulin shot hurt, but the three vaccine shots were just pinpricks. And it was a relief to know we didn’t have to worry about a disease that, while extremely rare in humans, is 100% lethal.

A man in Illinois became the first rabies fatality in that state since 1954 after waking up to a bat on his neck but refusing the vaccine. If you wake up with a bat, get your shots. Because that one in a million chance is a horrible way to go.

[ThTh3] Are young people less “sex-positive”? There are myriad way you could look at this. Surveys indicate that kids are waiting longer to have sex than ever before. And while surveys are a poor tool at best, plunging birth rates for teenagers are an objective indication that this may reflect reality. Why this is happening is another question. Fear of intimacy, computers and economic struggles have all had their turn as explanations. A more recent twitch has linked this to porn. Gusatvo Turner argues that this claim is unsupported by any actual information other than elite naval gazing.

My pet theory? All of the above (except the porn thing). Plus, growing opportunities for girls means they are putting off dating and intimacy until later in life.

[ThTh4] Look, anyone could misplace a supernova for 900 years. Have you seen astronomer’s offices? Impossible to find anything in there.

[ThTh5] Behold the colors of the moon, a collage of lunar images it took a photographer ten years to accumulate.

[ThTh6] Aurora Borealis and a satellite launch. Does it get any better than that? No. No it doesn’t.

Here's a timelapse and real-time sequence of @NASA @ulalaunch #AtlasV rocket launch & pass through the aurora borealis in Ringvassøya, Norway tonight before their mission #Landsat9 🚀🌌@StormHour @TamithaSkov @iTromso @bladetnordlys @torybruno @visitnorway @chunder10 pic.twitter.com/SKvqZhQNY6

— Night Lights (@NightLights_AM) September 28, 2021

[ThTh7] Jupiter’s red spot is speeding up.

[ThTh8] Our West Virginia contingent will appreciate the latest awesomeness from Green Bank.

[ThTh9] This is a deep cut but quite hilarious.

Symbols https://t.co/U9rv1IjsNK pic.twitter.com/jd4NWH1rql

— Randall Munroe (@xkcd) September 24, 2021

[ThTh10] Reasons to like this energy-saving method of freezing? It’s already been shown to work and would require only minimal changes to the way we freeze things now.

[ThTh11] I’ll have to think a lot about this article, which talks about professors teaching students who use computers constantly but have no idea how file systems and directory structures work. I’ve not really seen this myself, but my students tend to be older. What I actually took away from it is that there might be future careers for people who are the computer equivalent of plumbers — don’t require a college education but have a nuts-and-bolts understanding of how computers actually function.

[ThTh12] Is it possible that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is based on an actual meteor strike? I’ve heard this theory for a while and it’s certainly plausible. If a decent-sized meteor hit a city, it would be like a nuclear bomb going off. But I hesitate to apply scientific thinking to biblical stories. We’ll see if more evidence comes out.

[ThTh13] I just knew the Scots would claim to have invented sex.

[ThTh14] We’re still puzzling out how life started on Earth. Here’s a new theory.