The Epidemiologist And Thief

Michael Osterholm of U. Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research And Policy (CIDRAP), and the Minnesota Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari came out in an editorial in favor of a renewed and stricter set of lockdowns to address the spread of COVID-19:

To successfully drive down our case rate to less than one per 100,000 people per day, we should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers. By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 39 percent of workers in the United States are in essential categories. The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.

But how to pay for this? Isn't keeping people alive during this new lockdown going to be terribly expensive? They have an answer for this (emboldening mine):

This pandemic is deeply unfair. Millions of low-wage, front-line service workers have lost their jobs or been put in harm’s way, while most higher-wage, white-collar workers have been spared. But it is even more unfair than that; those of us who’ve kept our jobs are actually saving more money because we aren’t going out to restaurants or movies, or on vacations. Unlike in prior recessions, remarkably, the personal savings rate has soared to 20 percent from around 8 percent in January.

Because we are saving more, we have the resources to support those who have been laid off. Typically when the government runs deficits, it must rely on foreign investors to buy the debt because Americans aren’t generating enough savings to fund it. But we can finance the added deficits for Covid-19 relief from our own domestic savings. Those savings end up funding investment in the economy. That’s why traditional concerns about racking up too much government debt do not apply in this situation. It is much safer for a country to fund its deficits domestically than from abroad.

Such savings are not the government's to spend, though, unless

1. the government confiscates such savings, or
2. taxes them at a very high rate.

Joe Biden has lately said he would institute such a lockdown if scientists recommended it ("I would listen to the scientists"). This has already happened. Given the printing press approach to buffering the population from the consequences of COVID-19, it's unlikely the fiscal oppression approach will get traction, but it's far from guaranteed.

Michael Mina: Diagnostic And Surveillance Tests Need Different Kinds Of Regulatory Approval

Buried in this Harvard Magazine article is a point that I didn't emphasize enough in my previous article on COVID-19 rapid/cheap testing, and that is: diagnostic and surveillance tests are different beasts with different requirements, but the FDA currently treats both identically (emboldening mine, as per always):

Mina has been predicting the advent of more widely available, cheaper tests for months. But those tests have not materialized, largely because of regulatory risk, he says: manufacturers cannot meet Food and Drug Administration (FDA) templates for test sensitivity that use PCR as the standard. The FDA—whose approval process is stringent because it is designed to test the efficacy of clinical diagnostics—has no jurisdiction over public-health testing. But at the moment, there is no alternative regulatory process for tests designed to ensure population-level wellness—such as a certification program that might be run through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the agency charged with safeguarding the public health.

“It is time to stop allowing diagnostic definitions to get in the way of absolutely essential public-health interventions,” says Mina, for whom explaining the distinction between the two types of test, and the different ways they can be used, has been an uphill battle. But it is one that he desperately hopes to win—and that the country needs him to win—for public-health measures to stand a chance of reining in the outbreak as schools and other institutions move toward reopening this fall.

It's probably asking too much to have the FDA make a whole different track for surveillance tests on the fly like this, but clearly something has to give.

At Last, Something Approximating A Plan In Portland

I recently despaired at the problem of Black Lives Matters offering no policy directions to improve policing and diminish police abuse of blacks. It therefore came as welcome news when I found out about Reimagine Oregon's surprisingly meaty list of policy demands, particularly their section on police divestments. A great deal of this has already been accomplished in some form or another (banning the use of chokeholds, mandated duty to report/intervene in cases of violence, making officer disciplinary records visible to the public) with many other particulars still on the table. Some correspond to reforms I have already proposed, but many strike me as commonsense beyond those:

• Prevent contract arbitration from limiting disciplinary action.
• Demilitarize the police, including ending (a) tear gas use, (b) sound cannons, and (c) flashbang grenades. (a) will be extremely difficult to implement (crowd control is still a legitimate function of government), but the other two ((b) especially) are so overused as to be serious problems.
• Decriminalize public transportation fare evasion.
• Prohibit public transportation fare evasion as justification for search warrants.
• Remove sworn and armed officers from public university campuses. This is probably unlikely to happen, and in any case, how much of a problem does this realistically present? University campuses are hardly a hotbed of crime to begin with.
• Ban the receipt of militarized equipment (1033 transfers). This is well overdue.
• Reconsider personnel public records requests. Police disciplinary records need to be public. Despite a nearly 60-year-old Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland, that has frequently been read to imply that police disciplinary records germane to court proceedings must be made available to the defense, it is frequently flouted in practice.
• Consider the laws that allow expunction [expungement] without costs for people with no convictions in a certain number of years.
• End 48 hour rule that delays police officer questioning after a charge of excessive force is raised.
• Eliminate qualified immunity, duh.

There are other items aimed at the county and municipal levels, but this strikes me as a fine first crack at achievable line-items. The biggest single item missing, and the hardest one to implement, is ending police unions. The question in my mind is whether the Portland protesters have anything whatsoever to do with this group.