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Remember the COVID lockdowns, when billions of school children were confined to their rooms not so much because there was a reasonable suspicion that they were positive, or because they would be competing for ICU beds if infected, but frankly because their freedom was a price the adults were willing to pay to delay the spread of the disease a bit while keeping the economy going?
Contrast with the Hantavirus. Now, I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method, even though the utilitarian case seems a bit stronger than for most of his other targets due to tail risks.
But it seems to me that the Hondius should be a Dutch problem, as it is sailing under the Dutch flag. Now, if the Netherlands had cut a deal with Spain to quarantine the people aboard the ship in Tenerife, or even to fly them back to the Netherlands in a charted plane, that would still seem reasonable. Instead, it was apparently decided that the potentially infected people are the problem of their respective states, and they were quickly repatriated (apart from the crew, which is mostly quarantined in Rotterdam because the Philippines were unwilling to just charter a plane to allow their countrymen the luxury of being quarantined on their home soil).
Now, I am an utilitarian. Out of about 200 people on that ship, three have died (so far -- at least another is in 'serious condition'). Without bothering to search for the ages of the victims, let's call it 60 life-years lost (but feel free to refute that). Arbitrarily, let's decide that a life in quarantine has a quality factor of 0.5 (because half the people like Netflix and half would prefer biking instead). Locking up ~200 people for about six weeks each might thus cause a loss of 12 QALYs. The point being that even without considering the the potential for superspreaders, a quarantine would seem proportional.
Yes, containing the cruise ship outbreak would not stop a pandemic if the strain is pandemic-grade, as it is likely endemic in Argentina. However, I do not think this refutes its purpose. You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".
Culture war angle: different countries are going to handle the quarantine slightly differently:
vs MAHA:
Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles. Long incubation period and high mortality (in humans -- the cute little rodents are fine!) certainly form a nice basis if it evolves to be more transmittable between humans. Of course, the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID. (And the perspective of the other side is not very helpful either -- I would sooner take military advice from Hegseth than I would take medical advice from Kennedy.) On Polymarket, a Hantavirus pandemic in 2026 trades at around 10%. This is obviously limited by the usual effects -- even if you believe that the probability is zero, 10% gain over seven months or so is not that great of a return of investment. It would be useful if there were pandemic bonds traded on the open market (so one could compare their prices to what they are usually), but from what I can tell there are none.
Eh... Anyways, the difference is that for a certain kind of mindset, "punishing" everyone is more acceptable than "punishing" a subset. Yes this is terrible and braindead; no I don't know how to solve it.
A utilitarian Argentine government should pay people to at minimum threaten tourists that want to go to the hantavirus garbage dump. They should just kill the birds that seem to be the main attraction.
I don't really expect it to be the next pandemic, but I don't think a current-Scott will be as useful or forthcoming as any of several eras of old-Scott. Maybe I'm too cynical there, Kelsey's been a bit spicier than she used to be (low bar to hit!), but... should he publish such an article it will be after most useful points. At best we catch a tweet, or if you're closer to him you hear it first or second hand conversationally.
Current WHO recommendation is that everyone on the ship is high-risk, should be tracked for 42 days minimum, and should wear N95s. This is less than ideal but better than I expected.
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The school closures were useless because by then it was far too late, and even then it was already established the virus was not nearly as deadly as feared especially among young people. For the vast majority of people, Covid was like a bad cold.
if the Hantavirus can be confined to the ship, then a stronger case can be made for quarainte, with appropriate monetary compensation.
Out of money put options on index funds can also accomplish this. The problem is these tend to be cash incinerators 95-99% of the time. If you throw 1% of your net worth on these , you can make a nice profit if this is a repeat of Covid...a few people did this in early 2020. This is unlikely though, from Google "Hantavirus is generally not highly contagious between people and does not spread like common respiratory viruses such as COVID-19 or flu."
Yes put prices would be a good indicator. And a big reason why you know polymarket market isn’t legitimate or sized. It’s not that 13% isn’t a great return - you could actually easily arb it with index puts. Bet no at 13% and buy a certain amount of index puts with the 13%. Cross collateralize them.
If a pandemic occurs again
Or something like sell a long-dated delta positive at-the-money straddle on SPY. This will collect a lot of premium, and then buy the 3 months far-OTM SPY puts, which will be offset by the premium collected on the straddle. If the market tanks, the puts will surge and easily offset the loss on the straddle. The problem is when the puts don't "explode" despite the market falling, due to the greeks not behaving. You would need something like a -5-7% day to get the explosion effect.
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More generally, is Polymarket still a reliable indicator of anything at this point? Between direct observations/experiences and a number of high-profile stories about insiders manipulating data sources like ISW, I get the sense that you have to put a nontrivial probability that any market outcome will be determined by shenanigans (of the "the person controlling the obscure WHO website deep link that will be used for resolving is betting too, and nobody will punish him for changing it for 10 minutes" type, or the "a small group of power users knows that on Polymarket 'pandemic' is taken to mean any disease discussed by Andrew Fauci on TV while wearing a pink tie" type) rather than anything resembling a plain interpretation of its subject.
Accordingly, 13% on pandemic could easily be dominated by a signal like "small group of users in the know sees that an account representing resolution manipulators is betting yes, and betting according to their expectation that the market will be successfully manipulated to yes".
Now it fell to 9%. I think it would be easy to manipulate the market due to thin liquidity.
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I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools; I think it was an extremely irrational thing to do which will prove to have had lasting negative repercussions on a generation of children. But the reason we did so wasn't because of a cynical desire to boost the economy at all costs, but rather because people were panicking about the virus and were desperate that Something Be Done. Many, many people were completely unwilling to consider any course of action except for the maximally safe one, and so we closed down the schools even though I don't think there was ever a significant risk to leaving them open.
Schools weren't closed for the children, they were closed for the faculty. The public school educator and management class is dominated by progressive anxiety superspreaders.
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I'm not sure when it should have been clear to the authorities that prepubescent children were very low risk, not only for serious illness but also for transmission. By the start of the new school year in autumn 2020, and probably earlier, it was obvious to intelligent onlookers that you could have reopened schools up to age ~14 with negligible additional transmission (and of course high schools should have reopened once the vaccine was available to teachers and pupils who wanted it). But my memory of the public conversation at the time was that people were incapable of grokking that virus spread is based on physiology and that teens are physiological adults, not 'children'. The logic of "15-year-olds can spread the virus (which they could, even if they were not going to get life-threatening symptoms), so 'children' can spread the virus, so we need to lock down 7-year-olds" was irrefutable in both policy-world and normie-world.
The US (though not other countries) did a particularly bizarre thing where many states kept the schools closed long after entertainment venues and suchlike had reopened. Education Realist had some excellent posts on the politics of this - the reason is that it wasn't establishment COVID panicans keeping the schools closed, it was a coalition between the teachers' unions and every parent demographic that didn't trust the government apart from the red tribe COVID minimizers.
The U.S. was not monolithic. Red states reopened schools pretty early (with much condemnation from the prestige media and the democrats). This includes high schools (which again costs of closures did not justify any benefits from closure). Red states did just fine compared to blue states.
But the NEA got a lot of perks for their members and the NEA is stronger in blue states. COViD was an excuse for the NEA to extract value.
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Eh, schools were most likely going to close regardless of what people wanted. Staffing shortages were happening nationwide during COVID. Without enough bus drivers, you can't get kids to school. Without the teachers, they just sit in the auditorium on their phones after being shuffled around from overpacked classrooms (real story I remember reading in like mid 2021). Without the cafeteria workers, they can't make enough lunch. Not enough maintenance workers means things breaking. Etc etc.
Staff shortages were so bad that some school districts were going back to remote learning at least as late as Jan 2022. And even in Mar 2022, multiple states were deploying the national guard to work as substitutes. Some areas were even taking police officers off the beat in order to work as substitutes.
It's easy to say in retrospect "we should have opened the schools" but it wasn't easy at the time. Even the schools and states that were trying to reopen kept having to fall back to remote or fail somehow else.
The things you identify would be a change in US culture. And particular blue state third-worldism. Florida reopened their schools in the fall. I agree closing the schools for the spring semester probably had to happen. Too many older teachers and figuring out how to give some people an out. The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.
Nobody is saying in “retrospect”. Many states did reopen. Many people said as it was happening that we should open the schools. Or at a minimum some form of hybrid to accommodate some staff with immune issues.
Greg Abbott had created a task force specifically about their staff shortages in Texas in 2022. In Oklahoma, they used employees across various state agencies as substitutes.. In Iowa many schools have moved to (and many are still at!) four day school weeks. And here's a story from 2024 about Florida still dealing with staff shortages of teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.
In specifically Florida, the shortages were so bad that they had to draw substitutes from non traditional sources. One district even emailed the parents asking for them to step in as substitute workers. Some shortages are still ongoing! Like last year some parents were dealing with delays in school bus pickups due to shortages of workers
Honestly the school week probably should be 3-4 days a week like college. It’s more efficient.
Those areas did open
Do you even read your own links? Florida is quoted as paying $10-13 an hour for substitutes. Or just google a bunch of links for staff shortages? If this was important they could hike pay. You can make double walking into a Chipotle.
Florida schools perform fine so it’s probably not a real issue. Though the demographic adjusted stats don’t account for Flordia Hispanics being white Europeans while California is filled with Amerindians.
OK, this bears repeating, even though I thought everyone knew the point of the US public school system is not education. It has many purposes to many different people; social engineering(mainly by shifting the default choice for middle class women away from 'housewife' rather than anything to do with the students, it's not good enough at indoctrination for that- although it has been in the past), free daycare, giving older kids something to do other than being rowdy, etc. Hell some of it is just very expensive signaling. But 'actually educating kids', let alone doing so efficiently, falls very low on the list of priorities, and US school systems which prioritize it over all these other goals(creating employment demand for college educated women, warehousing teenagers where they'll be less annoying, etc) perform much better than public schools.
50% agree. It’s primary mission is still education at a minimum it’s what drives the economy getting the top 20% educated and into the professional class.
But yes it does all that other stuff. And in certain areas the education part is the least important. Assimilation use to be important but we seem to have given that up.
As far as Covid goes staff shortages were not important for educating. A reduced schedule with off-day homework accomplishes that.
The top 20% would be educated regardless- their parents can afford private school.
The system panics when teachers aren't going to get paid, when the free daycare isn't being provided it's a big deal, job cuts are a horrible tragedy, but when the kids don't learn it's a shrug and a demand for more money- interventions to provide school lunches during the summer, even outside of the school setting, are very welcomed by the system. Interventions to educate kids better are not.
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Yes that's basic economics. Having to raise your pay in a shortage is the default thing expected in a shortage. Supply goes down but demand stays the same = price goes up. That doesn't change that supply went down.
This was about pandemic caused shortages of labor. Not states refusing to hire workers.
Your articles come closer to proving my point by Bayesian logic. You went google searching for “teacher shortage” and the best articles you could find were school districts offering wages 50% of no-skill wages which is essentially no different than just deciding not to hire.
It’s like saying I want a Ferrari and my bid is $15k. I don’t actually want a Ferrari.
If workers currently cost X part of the budget, and then a supply shock causes them to cost 1.5x the budget in order to maintain the same quantity of workers, then it is a problem of shortages. Price is the result of supply and demand. Yes you can pay more to help make up for the shortage and get new supply, but that you have to pay more is because of a supply shock.
The same way if you were to buy cheese every week for 2 dollars and then suddenly a disease spread through the cows and less cheese could be made this year and it now cost 4 dollars. Yes you can pay more to get the same amount of cheese for yourself. There is still a cheese shortage.
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Sûre, there’s a shortage of school workers- but there’s also a general labor shortage, and schools don’t pay exceptionally well(especially in non-teacher roles, school maintenance and driving and nursing roles pay much much less relative to skill set and qualifications than teaching does). That doesn’t distinguish schools from thousands of other things that did reopen on time.
Well some things are better at reopening under capacity than others. A hardware store might be able to handle 3/4th the workers by just letting some tasks go undone and having customers not served as fast. But a school with 3/4th the teachers means classrooms getting crowded, and especially with younger children who are gonna be more rowdy and energetic in general, harder to control. Likewise 3/4th the cafeteria crew and all of a sudden you don't have enough food being made in time for the children or food safety requirements aren't being met. If it's not too bad, you can get away with just telling the few kids at the end "sorry we out of X, gotta have Y" but it doesn't have too much leniency. Schools are still making up for staff shortages in this way. Large bus driver shortages mean kids don't get to school but the smaller bus driver shortages just mean some kids get to school 40 minutes later.
But still there's only so much that can be worked with, especially when dealing with the young children and legal requirements that politicians were hesitant to change over temporary issues, that during the height of COVID they just didn't have much choice.
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I’m reminded of when Covid hit Finland in early March 2020 and within a week everything shut down (except workplaces that couldn’t go remote, stores and so on of course).
That had nothing to do with any government decisions. You can’t exactly run eg. a restaurant when 95% of your customer base disappears overnight. Business owners were outright begging for official restrictions because then they could at least apply for some types of benefits.
One industrial equipment manufacturer was in the news for major furloughs right in the beginning. The catch: They did that two weeks before things shut down locally because their international customers had already canceled or delayed so many orders due to general disruption in the far east.
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Also to, beat a dead horse, closing schools is not confining kids to their rooms. At least in the US. It's not enough that people in Australia were under house arrest, we must pretend that was the case everywhere.
That's... not what happened in Australia.
During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.
Okay. I exaggerated. In reality, NSW and Victoria residents (over half the country) were only permitted to be within 5km of home (unless the Melbourne night curfews were in effect).
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Jesus Christ, this is the bar? You know there are people serving actual prison sentences that have that same amount of freedoms, i.e. brief leaves on weekends and access to commissary?
I think Olive meant being able to go for walks at any time.
Late answer but in Paris, where I lived during most of the pandemic, there was a curfew at 6 pm, after which you were not allowed to leave your house without a valid reason (medical emergency, work, etc.) Your daytime movement was also heavily restricted to 1 hour at a time, and within 1km radius of your apartment. You had to fill out and sign a specific form clarifying your reason for being outdoors every single time you left your home.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-france-requires-form-leave-house-walk-shopping-2020-3
I assume it maybe wasn't quite as extreme in Australia, but in Paris we most certainly could not leave home to go for walks at any time.
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Australia is federal and used targetted lockdowns and external and internal border controls to (broadly successfully) maintain zero COVID in unaffected areas - my understanding is that @sarker's comments would be permissible exaggeration in the case of Melbourne but false as applied to almost anywhere else in Australia.
@OliveTapenade - where in Australia were you?
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Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.
I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
I've looked into the swedish response back during Covid and as far as I can see, they did mostly the same: They made a lot of recommendations to minimize social contact, they just didn't force you. And this worked: If you look, for example, into mobility data such as usage of trains and subways, it went down just the same as other large cities across the west.
The big problem with mandated legal lockdowns such as the UK and germany, both of which I'm more directly familiar with due to having lived in both and having family & friends in both, was their pointless tyranny and nonsense rules. I have a friend who got a massive fine in the UK. His crime? He took a walk with his flatmates through a forest - which was further than his allowed distance. He lived in central London of course, so he was allowed to take walks there. I, too, got told to move along and go home again in the UK. I was sitting on a park bench in a mostly-empty park reading a book.
Germany I at least didn't experience any problems going outside - but I was deliberately living in the countryside with my parents & girlfriend. My mom constantly reminded us, every time we technically were breaking the law, such as driving too far from home or staying outside too long or whatever. The situation in the cities was, of course, very different. Plenty of friends barely left their rooms and actually got stopped and controlled by police when they did, getting questioned to make sure they had legitimate reason to be outside.
Not to mention the insanities on the day care and school system and their still-lingering effects. Frequent & long closures threw back parents and children months to years in their career and education, respectively. Worse, the new culture of 1) always taking sick leave no matter how weak a cold is and b) always having to stay home two extra days after the cold passed "to be safe" is still on the books in many places and makes everything unworkable insofar as people actually follow the rules.
Again, my mom is a day care worker herself and she is extremely pissed about her younger coworkers constantly taking sick leave, always for a full week. She is staying even when seriously sick, because otherwise it would mean all the parents who depend on them couldn't work. This is still going on. Our own daycare also still has these rules on the book, and a few of the workers do seem to take advantage, but at least not as many. Several of our friends with older kids tell similar stories of schools with constant "teacher shortfalls" which are entirely due to teachers constantly taking sick leave by sticking to the letter of the current rules.
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Good for y'all. The US version was that public parks that had gates were chained shut, people were fined for going to the beach, etc. In the UK your neighbors would snitch on you for being outside.
In my state of Washington they banned fishing. Not congregating with others to go fishing, fishing in general. Casting a line off of your own dock was illegal for awhile.
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Yes, US and UK were retarded about it. That does not mean that the only options were "do nothing" or "be completely retarded" and we have examples of western nations that had generally sane responses that didn't involve locking everyone indoors or forcibly shutting down workplaces but also didn't literally tell people to go out to bars and restaurants (which Sweden did in 2020 spring) or keep elderly and other high risk groups during the highest case peaks without masks or any visiting restrictions.
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Sweden did great if you look at excess deaths over a two year period. And no, it wasn’t because everyone stayed home.
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Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal? There were a bunch of scares, Nipah and Marburg and monkeypox and H5N1 that turned out to be not such a big deal. Everyone is just a bit scared since COVID and so the media will amp that right up.
I know degens on 4chan have already anthropomorphized and sexualized the hantavirus like COVID before that but we should probably be fine? They panic about everything, real or imaginary.
Nevertheless anyone who comes down with a novel strain of disease should be strictly quarantined IMO, not flown around the world to max out infectivity.
If you get hantavirus it's a huge deal. But you won't get it. It just doesn't spread that easily among humans. "There are hantavirus cases!" has been true (nearly?) every year, in the continental US; this one is just special because it was in sufficiently cramped conditions that it infected more than just like one guy sweeping up contaminated mouse droppings without an N95.
https://www.nmhealth.org/data/view/infectious/890/
It's also Andes virus, a strain known for human-to-human transmission, rather than the North American Sin Nombre virus, which is not. (It's called Sin Nombre because two proposed names based on where it was first found didn't pass political muster)
That's an important distinction, but it looks like the resulting epidemiology still isn't much different? Wiki claims the Andes strain is about 1/6 of the human hantavirus cases in Argentina, which would mean it's been responsible for roughly a couple dozen cases a year since the mid-90s. Having a dozen cases in the same cruise ship is creepy, and maybe it means this'll end up on the list of otherwise-obscure diseases that turn into serious risks in crowded semi-confined ship/barracks/dorm conditions, but it still doesn't look like the "first zoonotic/lab-leak appearance in humans, followed by exponential doubling in the general population every few weeks" we saw from Covid.
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No.
Among other things it has a much smaller window of H2H transmission.
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odds are it's not a big deal. It's not nearly as contagious of Covid.
If you mean that literally: what odds do you have in mind?
polymarket is giving a 9% odds of pandemic in 2026. I would put my odds closer to 1-2%. Unlike Covid, it's not spread through breathing. it requires exposure to fecal matter
How could it become a pandemic, then? Do you give it 1-2% chance because of the chance it could mutate? (Or already did mutate, we just don't know it yet)
That is why the odds are not zero. 2% seems right for tiny possibility of mutations or unforeseen
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There was the time I cleaned out a closet full of dead mouse bodies without a mask, and then people said: you shouldn't do that, mouse droppings carry diseases! I have now mildly updated towards not doing that in the future.
That’s been common advice for voles locally for decades because the only native hantavirus is transmitted by vole droppings. It isn’t deadly but can be nasty, particularly if you have any kidney issues and applying basic precautions is so easy that you’d have to be a stupid not to take them (ie. wear a mask).
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This isn't even a novel hantavirus. It's Andes strain.
As we all know, no virus that is slightly transmissible between humans could ever mutate to become more transmissible between humans.
Or a virus that's slightly harmful to humans could mutate to become more deadly. As has happened. If you worry about all of the possibilities, you'll never stop worrying.
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COVID was such a complete mess that we never even bothered to do a proper post-incident debriefing report. Nobody even wants to think about what we should do differently next time. A lockdown would have worked in December 2019. By mid-January it was too late.
We should have kept everyone on the boat in the middle of the ocean and resupplied them by helicopter.
There will never be a covid postmortem, because a postmortem would end with ‘and the information to know that this is a terrible strategy was available in March, before we embarked on it, thé experts were often lying, thé western vaccines were delayed for no reason, and needless social damage was done despite everyone in a decision making position knowing full well there was no need for that’.
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A lockdown would never have been an effective means of controlling COVID, for the simple reason that, unlike SARS, it spreads asymptomatically.
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The whole thing went from total crisis mode to the virus being a lot less deadly than feared. So interest waned. Also, a deep investigation would implicate the very people doing the investigating ( governments, scientists, agencies, and leaders). I think there is too much stake to want to lay the blame anyone or any party. Let's assume China is at fault--are US leaders going to risk tanking the economy in retaliation? Probably not.
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My first instinct was to just firebomb it but your plan sounds a lot more humane. OTOH, how do you decide when to let them come back from sea? Given the long incubation hantavirus could circulate on the boat for years, right? At some point the people confined there have an incentive to lie about positive tests being negative?
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China supposedly succeeded with lockdowns. An autopsy on that would be interesting. Even if true though we never could have done that. And non of the vaccines were full preventative to later mutations.
Honestly an autopsy on their data would be more interesting to me.
Most Asian countries (including Australia) succeeded pre-omicron with broadly the same set of tactics, which did not include nationwide lockdowns.
The key tactics were:
The big mistake most western countries made was not doing contact tracing - the UK (and, as I understand it, most other western countries) had a smartphone-tracker app which would tell you when to voluntarily self-isolate. In the UK the app generated too many false positives that could be disconfirmed by manual follow-up, but instead led to people simply ignoring requests to self-isolate. The US got worse results than other western countries because they made additional mistakes, like keeping schools closed longer than necessary and botching the rollout of LFTs.
What’s LFT?
Lateral flow tests.
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If they did, one wonders why they deemed it necessary to lock down entire cities of millions of people at the drop of a hat – in 2022. And by "lockdown", I mean millions of people who were physically unable to leave their apartment buildings, with food supplied via drone.
They knew it was a lab originated critter, had no qualms about putting down the authoritarian hammer yet they too were unsure of how bad it was going to get, thus the panicked response.
I'm not asking why China locked down entire cities. I'm asking why, if China supposedly succeeded in stopping the spread of COVID using lockdowns, they were still locking down entire cities more than two years after the virus was first discovered.
Omicron was more infectious (and less deadly) than wild type/alpha/delta. China had a set of effective controls that could maintain zero COVID with the earlier strains, but failed once omicron reached them. The city-wide lockdowns were trying to suppress omicron by doing the same shit harder, whereas in the West even the zero COVID crowd gave up at that point and pretty much every country except China and New Zealand (which was sufficiently remote that they could contain even omicron at the border) let omicron rip. (It helped that we had a vaccine that mostly worked and the Chinese didn't).
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