GO BACK TO AWAY! WILLIAM WATSON,

By now many of us have seen Come from Away, the longest-running Canadian Broadway show ever, a charming musical about the warm welcome the people of Gander, Newfoundland, gave thousands of international air travellers diverted there after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It’s a funny, beautifully crafted celebration of the empathy and openness of Newfoundlanders — an attitude that must have something to do with living by the sea because Atlantic Canadians in general are famous for the same traits, albeit expressed in an accent that’s usually a little easier to understand.

But now COVID madness seems to have overtaken the region. On friendly Prince Edward Island, of all places, people with off-Island licence plates are finding their cars keyed, with angry messages folded under their windshield wipers telling them, in even pungently unquotable terms, to go back to Away.

I enjoyed P.E.I. hospitality first-hand just 10 months ago — though that now seems as distant as 2001, even 1901 — so it’s strange to think fellow Canadians will get no welcome at all in this traditionally most welcoming of regions. Will we soon, Soviet-style, need internal passports to get around?

This thought occurred to me as I read a new research paper on “immunity passports” by Daniel Hemel and Anup Malani, professors at the University of Chicago Law School. (Malani is also at the Pritzker School of Medicine.) Like most of the current Niagara of COVID research, it has not yet been peer-reviewed. But who its authors are employed by gives them instant cred.

Immunity passports don’t exist yet but it’s not hard to imagine that at some stage people who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies will get official certification that will allow them to: travel more widely (maybe even to P.E.I.); work where social distancing is difficult; ride in elevators; and frequent pubs and bars.

EXTENDING UNEMPLOYMENT

BENEFITS — OR IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT, CERB — ALSO TILTS THE CALCULATION.

If you’re an economist, as soon as you hear about such a possibility your mind turns to what could go wrong. Thus the title of Hemel and Malani’s paper is “Immunity passports and moral hazard.”

One moral hazard is that people will forge immunity passports, which creates obvious dangers of potentially or actually infected people wandering around pretending to be immune (assuming antibodies do provide immunity). The researchers focus instead on the possibility that people who want to get back to work will deliberately infect themselves so as to acquire immunity — a kind of DIY vaccination for people without access to their own billion-dollar research labs.

If we assume people are rational calculators — and our authors warn that many of us aren’t — what math exactly will such a calculator go through in order to decide whether to infect herself or not? (The authors adopt now-standard academic practice and use the feminine personal pronoun even though many people’s life experience will suggest it’s more likely to be males who do such cold-blooded sums.)

A lot of the paper is in algebra but the authors kindly summarize: “the agent will self-infect if the utility she will derive from extra after-tax income with an immunity passport, less the health disutility of infection, associated medical expenses, and the probability-weighted mortality cost, exceeds zero.”

To figure out what’s worthwhile for the typical “agent” the authors have to plug in lots of data — “plausible parameters” — which they happily do: No cost for asymptomatic infection. US$2,500 per day for hospitalization, three times that for intensive care (though the feds cover uninsured patients’ COVID costs). Average hospital stay: 11.3 days, based on experience in California and Washington, but 19.4 days for ICU patients. Tax rates that vary with age and income. Probability of death based on Chinese experience. Cost of death based on “value of a statistical life” numbers drawn from studies that show how much more people have to be paid to take on riskier jobs.

In the end, as you might expect, considerations about mortality dominate. But not so much as to rule out self-infection. For younger people, especially, the longer the anticipated lockdown, the more sense it makes to take the risk, get yourself infected, and return to earning income.

The obvious problem, apart from getting the calculations wrong, is that while you’re roaming around trying to get infected you create an externality. While you’re infectious but asymptomatic you could become a super-spreader. Getting infected may make sense for you but you’re ignoring the harm to people you infect.

What can be done? In the U.S. context, not paying for coronavirus health care would raise the cost of self-infection. Under Canadian medicare, of course, we don’t have that option. Extending unemployment benefits — or in the Canadian context, CERB — also tilts the cost-benefit calculation against self-infection. The net gain from working is not so strong if your income is being provided for you.

Another way to avoid the externality associated with self-infection, though the authors say “we emphatically do not endorse this option,” would be government-controlled infection sites, including “isolated living facilities where self-infected individuals could remain until no longer contagious.”

A charming green-gabled place by the sea might be nice. Or a craggy, salt-sprayed Rock looking out toward Ireland.