Coronavirus lessons from New York and San FranciscoIndermit Gill
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Since the first novel coronavirus case in the United States was registered on January 19, 2020, we have learned one thing about the discipline of public health: It has been masquerading as medicine but it is at best a social science, and not an especially sophisticated one.
Public health experts in the U.S. and the World Health Organization (WHO) have even made economists sound coherent and consistent.
More than three months into the outbreak, we have no clue about how many people are infected. Until we have reliable estimates of infection rates, public health professionals will not be able to tell us much about which places and people are most vulnerable to the virus, what might help to contain it, and how long the epidemic will be around. We’ll have to wait for accurate and affordable testing to know the extent of the infection.
Public health experts admit that without rigorous randomized testing—which is several months away—and a safe and effective vaccine—which may be more than a year away—they cannot tell us for how long economies have to be shut down.
To be fair, many things affect the spread and severity of any virus: medical conditions, the weather, population densities, economic structures, political considerations, social norms and, of course, government policies. Almost by definition for a novel virus like COVID-19, reliable data are not easy to come by.
To be fair, many things affect the spread and severity of any virus: medical conditions, the weather, population densities, economic structures, political considerations, social norms and, of course, government policies. Almost by definition for a novel virus like COVID-19, reliable data are not easy to come by.
The second is that information being supplied by the Chinese Communist Party, the government with the longest experience in dealing with the disease, is unreliable. The third is that Taiwan, which has done the best so far in containing the outbreak and keeping its economy working (while remaining the
second most free country in Asia), has been deliberately shut out of the international community. It all seems pretty hopeless.
Actually, not quite. There are ways to learn quickly about what works to contain the virus. One way is to study places that are similar in most aspects but have completely different rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The WHO has failed to establish uniform standards and ensure accurate reporting, but we can still compare places within a single country whose data are reliable (Figure 1). Despite obvious deficiencies in testing in the U.S., developing countries can learn a lot from its experience. And we can learn even more from Taiwan.
Figure 1. California is doing the best, New York the worst
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https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/04/07/coronavirus-lessons-from-new-york-and-san-francisco/https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/04/07/coronavirus-lessons-from-new-york-and-san-francisco/
