THE INFO CORONA-COASTER.

Nearing two months of lockdown — which is probably twice as long as most of us anticipated — many of us are on what’s been called the “corona-coaster,” experiencing sudden ups and downs as we read or hear things that either encourage us an end is in sight or make us think this could go on for years. The Economist reports the number of studies of COVID-19 is doubling every two weeks, which is now faster than the virus itself in many countries. So there is ample opportunity to take these emotional rides.

I was actually encouraged by last week’s labour force survey. The headline was bad: a 15.7 per cent drop in employment, April unemployment of 13.1 per cent, which would have been 17.8 per cent if 1.1 million people without work who hadn’t looked for work — for obvious reasons — had been included. But we knew it was going to be bad. Our governments ordered non-essential work to cease and it did.

Or it moved into people’s homes. Thus 5 million of us worked at least half our usual hours and did so from home, including 3.3 million for whom this was new (including one member of my family teaching university classes of 50 students from our front room/TV studio.) Just 20 years ago this would have been impossible. It changes the calculus of locking down or not.

I was also surprised that, according to StatCan, “just over one in five Canadians (21.1 per cent) lived in a household reporting difficulty meeting immediate financial obligations.” That means almost 80 per cent of households were at least hanging in there. Moreover, one out of five having trouble is basically the same as the Canadian Housing Survey found in 2018 — which (remember?) was pre-crisis. Among people aged 15 to 69 living in such a household, 21.4 per cent said they had applied for either CERB or EI benefits. Reading that, I thought it should be

CALCULATING THE ECONOMIC COST OF THE AMERICAN WAR ON THE VIRUS AT US$7 TRILLION

OR US$15,000 PER FAMILY.

higher. In the almost 80 per cent of households not having difficulty, only 9.8 per cent of people had applied, so at least that ratio is right.

On the downside a new study by three labour economists, including McGill’s Fabian Lange, reports that in the U.S. the drop-off in job postings has been economy-wide and was not markedly different in states that either shut down late or were planning to open up early. The economists base their conclusion on essentially real-time job vacancy data from a company called (its real name!) Burning Glass Technologies, which aggregates such data over more than 40,000 sites. Though UI filings were lower for the roughly one-third of jobs that can be done from home the decline in job postings was actually somewhat greater for such jobs, which may mean a recovery could be slower than hoped. The current damage to the economy “is too large and pervasive” to be caused simply by the stay-at-home orders.

On the other hand, a study from three economists at the classy university triad of Chicago, MIT and Princeton uses data from SafeGraph, a company that collects anonymized records of the movements of the owners of 20 million electronic devices, to check out how Americans’ mobility changed as a result of the pandemic. Most of the big changes actually took place before lockdowns were ordered, which suggests people were taking steps against infection even before being ordered to. In fact, though the data aren’t exactly commensurate, Americans’ pre-lockdown reductions in activity were on the same scale as Swedes’ were, according to Swedish data collected by Google.

Another new paper from three economists at Penn, Chicago and the National University of Singapore (economists, like trouble, often come in threes) suggests that flexibility in how goods and services are produced and how people interact both in consuming and in producing these goods and services can substantially — up to 80 per cent in their modelling — reduce the economic costs of the social distancing that will be required to keep the disease transmission rate, that now-famous R-naught, at tolerable levels. So that’s encouraging.

As is another new paper from a sole author at Duke (Adriano A. Rampini) who looks at a “sequential approach” to lifting lockdowns in an obviously greatly simplified population that consists of older people, who are more susceptible to the disease and generally don’t work, and younger people, who are less susceptible and generally do work. His dividing line is 55, except that, unlike in the old Freedom 55 TV commercials, greater freedom comes first for people under 55, while restrictions remain for us older folk. Rampini finds that ending lockdown in phases like this may “substantially reduce mortality, demands on the health-care system, and the economic cost of interventions.”

Another sole operator, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, encapsulates the up-down nature of our current position in a single paper by calculating the economic cost of the American war on the virus at US$7 trillion or US$15,000 per family. But he concludes from that, not that we should all pull our hair and rend our garments, but that the payoff to medical investments and advances is very large at the moment.

In the age of COVID, you have to take both the ups and downs of the info corona-coaster.