COVID-19
Looking at the Real Data on Lockdowns and Not-So-Lockdowns
If you’re trying to make sense of the ‘re-opening’ debate, here’s one resource that is worth looking at: Google’s COVID-19 Mobility Reports. This is just a slice of the oceans of data Google has at its corporate fingertips. Mainly it’s from geo-tracking data tied to your cellphones. In another conversation we can discuss the pros and cons of Google having access to this data and access to it as its own property. For now, it’s a valuable and fascinating resource for government officials and public health planners because it uses anonymized cellphone tracking data to produce very reliable and granular data on social and economic activity. As I said, Google has always had this and related data and it’s one of their core business assets. But they’ve made an edition of it available for the COVID19 Crisis.
‘Immune to Evidence’: How Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracies Spread
Lockdowns and Reopenings Aren’t Just What They Seem
Throughout the COVID19 Crisis Sweden has been held out as the counterexample to policies pursued throughout Europe and North America: no lockdowns, accept a high death toll and push on to herd immunity. The picture has been mixed. Sweden has a dramatically higher death toll than neighboring Scandinavian countries to which it is geographically proximate and demographically similar. But it has still fared better than hard-hit countries like Italy, France and the United Kingdom, which eventually pushed hard lockdowns to stem the spread of COVID.
But the real story is buried down at the end of this recent article in the Times.
